I come to you this week asking a genuinely curious question. Should churches update the old hymns’ language— when they sing them at all?

It’s a thought that’s been lurking in the back of my mind for some time. It resurrected last week while I listened to a podcast interview between Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray. At the end of the interview, a story one of them recounted led to an aside about the importance of poetry and language— especially the memorization of poetry. Because, as Murray said, “The (blank)tards can’t take it if you’ve got it up here.” Meaning in your mind.

In the following jumbled conversation, Peterson admitted he could tell Murray liked poetry because of how he spoke. By this, Peterson didn’t just mean Murray’s vibrant vocabulary but his cadence. His innate sense of lyricism. Murray confessed he believed he had this talent because he grew up reading and memorizing the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer.

I went, “Huh,” at this confession.

I grew up with the King James Bible, and while being Baptist, we didn’t have The Book of Common Prayer, but we did have some mighty old hymns. However— and this will sound very old-lady of me— my church recently purchased new hymnals, and the current fad is to update all the archaic language of our Mighty Old Hymns. I understand the arguments and logic behind doing it, and I’m certainly not in favor of making worship less accessible to people, but here’s what I worry about.

There’s a great narrowing that’s happening in Western culture. Our attention spans are shrinking. Our personal general knowledge retention is shrinking. The opinions and worldviews we expose ourselves to are becoming more siloed. And in the English-speaking world (because I can speak for no other), we are losing our language. The vocabulary of Millenials and the generations beneath them, while replete with fadish slang that changes as the wind blows and text abbreviations they use IRL, has been withering in substance and color for most likely longer than we realize.

Could it be their lack of poetry? An unwillingness to grapple with a word they’ve never seen?

And what is a hymn but a poem set to music?

I know what a bulwark is— do you?

One of the most significant symptoms of this narrowing is that modern poetry has become insipid— indistinguishable from prose;

Other than maybe we broke a line

Mid-sentence and finished our thought

Down here.

(Which is why I believe worship choruses are not wholesale— or worthy— replacements for hymns.)

How do we keep our children from becoming cliche swillers and adverbial junkies? (Don’t even get me started on that new country song called Religiously or, as I like to say, Word That Doesn’t Change the Meaning of My Thought in Any Way Song.) How do we keep kids from being addicted to slang? Empty-headed, blinking owls when confronted with a blank page? Inclined to hit the AI button when asked to compose?

Well, first of all, you need to introduce the language to them, and what better place to do that than at church? Where else can you introduce a child to the language of Shakespeare and give them an appreciation of classical music like Ode to Joy all at once?

I can hear you right now. You think you’re kids are too young to understand all those thees and thous.

They’re not.

But with an attitude like that, you’re only going to turn them into an adult who’s very much incapable of doing it.

Why does it matter, you ask, if they’re headed toward a future that’s as monotonal as they are?

It matters because beauty matters. Human beings need beauty when the darkness encroaches. Language is beautiful. The larger the language, the more beautiful it is. Ask the Greeks who had four or more different words for love. They got it. They understood that a language that does not have a word for every feeling and every color is a gray, if not black, existence. I dare you to consider that the spoken word was the universe’s first music, which was spoken by God himself.

I can assure you your child will figure out what a bulwark is if you give him the song’s context. And if he’s too impatient to find out on his own, he’ll ask. And if you don’t know, there’s always Google.

The story that Murray and Peterson shared was about a Russian linguist who was arrested and sent to the Gulags in the Soviet Union. While enduring the soul-crushing oppression of the camps, the only thing that kept her going was translating poetry— Lord Byron— into Russian. She did it from memory since Western books were banned, if not in all of the Soviet Union, then certainly in the Gulag.

If you study the personal accounts of survivors from camps like these, you find many similar testimonies. The poetry, the Bible verse, hymns, prayers- the things they had stored in their heart- pulled them free of the nightmare.

Why?

Because beautiful words are a balm to the soul and healing to the heart. They are the food of the dissident and the downtrodden— the ones who overcome anyways. And don’t you want to give your child the food of life?

The other night I sat waiting in the church foyer for our nursery kids. And this one boy burst through the door, running pell-mell for the stairs. He had this five-inch-thick book tucked under his arm.

“Tates!” I said. “What in the world is that?”

He stopped and looked at me with narrowed cat eyes. “The collected works of Shakespeare,” he said. Because every eleven-year-old reads Shakespeare.

“And you’re reading it?!” Oh, me, of little faith.

“Of course.”

“And you understand it?”

He skipped backward down the stairs. “Yeah. Henry the Fifth is kinda awesome.”

He rounded the corner and disappeared.

Huh. I sat there for a bit, shamed by a child.

Don’t be someone of little faith like me. Let’s not wall ourselves off from an incredible inheritance of faith and vocabulary because only the stodgy, white-hairs belt out A Mighty Fortress is Our God. This isn’t a call to shun new things, either. I enjoy a good worship chorus with the rest of them. But the barbarian world has become so because it has locked itself into an ever-churning present. It has no past and no vision for the future. It only wants what is Now, and Now is becoming narrower continually.

Be Bold. Keep the hymns and the Shakespeare in them. Read some poetry. Memorize it. Your children will thank you.

© 2023 Katie Baker