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  • Essay / Fundamentalism and Rock and Roll - 1025

    Holding to the five fundamentals, as many Christian fundamentalists call them, is consistent with the doctrinal truths of the movement. They believe in the inerrancy of the Scriptures, which reveal Christ as the Messiah, his virgin birth, the atonement in his blood, and his bodily resurrection. Additionally, embedded in the movement is the belief that they, the “saved,” are engaged in a cosmic war taking place here and now. As Reza Aslan explains, a cosmic war or religious war is "an earthly battle between rival religious groups...a real, physical struggle in this world and an imagined moral encounter in the world beyond." This war is a continuous battle taking place on all terrestrial sources, even on the airwaves. Since the early 1980s and with its peak in the 1990s, many fundamentalist Christians and other conservative religious believers have warned of the harms of rock music. As fundamentalist preacher Fletcher Brothers sums it up in his book The Rock Report: “Sex and drugs are synonymous with rock and roll. Rebellion, Satan equals rock and roll. Homosexuality, incest equals rock and roll. Sado-masochism, mutilation equals rock and roll. Suicide, alcohol, it's rock and roll. Despair, anti-godliness equals rock and roll. Murder, occultism equals rock and roll. The list goes on and on. » With such strong comments, it is no wonder that the Brothers proclaim: "I make no apologies when I say that I believe that rock music...is the public enemy number one of our young people today." today. » It is true that in general, rock and popular music have always displayed sexual and sometimes violent imagery. This has been true since the beginning of the music industry. Christian fundamentalists have even criticized the great Buddy H...... middle of paper...... greater cosmic forces - to win back lost souls and loosen Satan's grip. Works Cited Aslan, R. (2010). Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks. Fletcher A. Brothers, The Rock Report (Lancaster, PA: Starburst Publishers, 1987), p. 141 see Fletcher A. Brothers, The Rock Report. 13I'm in Love with You by Jesus CultureDavid W. Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), p. 12 Corinthians 10:3 Terry Watkins, “Christian Rock: Blessing or Blasphemy,” Dial-the-Truth Ministries nd (original italics), http://www.av1611.org/crock.html (accessed May 11, 2014) see Terry Watkins, “Christian Rock: Blessing or Blasphemy (bold in original text)