4 Famous Songs That Are Secretly Religious
Sometimes, you’ll be listening to a pop song, and then you’ll suddenly bolt upright and ask yourself, “Hold on. Is this a hymn?”
For example, you might realize the band you’re listening to is named “Creed,” and the song is talking about going “higher, to a place where blind men see.” Clearly, this about heaven. And yet the band actually insists they are not religious, as they’re not trying to preach anything to anyone. Instead, their music is most useful at scaring away wolves.
Or, you might hear that 1960s classic “Spirit in the Sky” and note the lyric, “Gotta have a friend in Jesus.” You then might conclude it’s a Christian song. Singer-songwriter Norman Greenbaum is actually Jewish, but penning that song was a smart move. It took him just 15 minutes and left him set for the rest of his life, allowing him to chill and just write songs about groceries, which might actually be about drugs.
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And sometimes, your discovery may get weirder than that, with songs you’d never have guessed were religious no matter how closely you listened.
Imagine Dragons’ ‘Radioactive’ Is About Leaving Mormonism
If you were told that one of Imagine Dragons’ songs is religious, maybe you’d go with “Believer,” because it talks about being a believer. Maybe you’d go with “Demons” because it talks about demons. Maybe you’d go with “Thunder” because that one’s so terrible that only divine intervention can explain its success.
Perhaps all those songs are inspired by religion. The band formed at Brigham Young University, and when you go on to leave the Church of Latter-day Saints, the memory of your time there stays with you. We know for sure that one song of theirs is about that subject: “Radioactive.”
The song tells of someone wandering a poisoned landscape after an apocalypse and joining a revolution, which sounds like the aftermath of war. For a long time, lead singer Dan Reynolds said it was about depression. Then he revealed that he’d actually written it about leaving Mormonism, which doesn’t mean it’s about abandoning faith, exactly. It’s about discovering spirituality, from the point-of-view that Mormonism is a lie, but faith is still real.
Now that you know the band has religious roots of some kind, you may speculate that their name is also a reference to believing in a higher power. They actually say its an anagram — of a mystery phrase, which they refuse to disclose. The best fan theory we’ve heard says the phrase is “ragged insomnia,” so let’s go with that.
Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Cecilia’ Is St. Cecilia
The idea that “Cecilia” is a song directed at a saint sounds absurd. The lyrics appear to obviously be sung to or about a love interest named Cecilia. During the song’s one verse, the singer is “making love in the afternoon with Cecilia,” which is not something you can easily do with a Roman saint who died in the third century. Also, he has to get up and wash his face in the middle of this, suggesting it’s the sort of sex that required special stealth to slip past radio censors back in 1970.
But Paul Simon would later note the song’s connection to Saint Cecilia, referring to her as the “goddess of music.” Again, that leaves the scene of afternoon delight quite confusing, but you could interpret the whole song as the singer’s relationship with music. That includes his getting up in the middle of lovemaking and returning to discover another man has replaced him. If you part ways with your muse, you may find the music biz substitutes someone else and abandons you.
Cecilia is indeed considered the patron saint of musicians in Catholicism. The way her story goes, she was forced into marriage, and she spent the wedding singing, away from everyone else. Later, she refused to have sex with her husband until he went on a pilgrimage, which ended with him seeing an angel. That sounds good for both of them, but it didn’t stop them both from being martyred horribly, which is the fate of most saints — and most musicians.
‘Dem Bones’ Is a Spiritual About the Promised Land
“The hip bone’s connected to the back bone,” says the lyrics of this kids’ song. “The back bone’s connected to the neck bone.” And it continues in this manner, from the knees to the shoulders, for no apparent reason other than teaching children the parts of the body.
But the final line of each verse — “Now shake dem skeleton bones!” — was different originally. Before, the line was, “Now hear the word of the Lord.” The song was a spiritual, first recorded in 1928 and sounding like this:
This original version of the song starts with this repeated line: “Ezekiel cried, ‘Dem dried bones.’” That’s because the whole song is a reference to the Book of Ezekiel in the Bible, in which the prophet Ezekiel is transported to the Valley of Dry Bones. He sees dry strewn bones, then sees them join together, then sees them get covered in flesh and return to life. This is all a vision from God, about the chosen people returning to the Land of Israel.
The exact orientation of phalanges to metatarsals doesn’t appear to be the focus of the prophecy, but the song covers this in detail. As you’ll see in the above video, the bones originally all joined together (then broke apart again) in a single uninterrupted verse, which gave the singers a chance to show off how high and low they could go.
Today, the song is most important during Halloween, because it gets children talking about spooky skeletons. That’s fine. When you get down to it, Halloween is the holiest night of the year.
‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ Is About the Greek Pantheon
“The Star-Spangled Banner” existed as a melody, before it received lyrics in the form of a poem by Francis Scott Key. If you’re a fan of trivia, you might already know that this melody came from a British drinking song. But what exactly was the song about? The lyrics are all still available, and you can listen to people sing them:
The song is about a bunch of Greek gods arguing with each other. When the poet Anacreon urges humanity to drink and screw, the god Jupiter gets angry and considers intervening. Apollo disagrees, claiming Jupiter's mighty thunderbolts are nothing against the power of music. A lesser-known god of laughter, Momus, chips in to say he agrees with Apollo, and Jupiter gives up, conceding hedonism is the way to go.
The United States may not have been founded as a religious country, but if you ever feel the need to pledge allegiance to one nation under God, feel free to specify which god that it is. It’s Jupiter, son of Saturn, the uncredited author of the terrible Imagine Dragons song “Thunder.”
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