This year’s proposed roundtable addresses the conference theme of freedom. In the spirit of multidisciplinary dialogue and engaging with scholars from diverse contexts, our panel seeks to probe the intersection of song, liturgical theology, resistance and liberation struggles.
Chair: Lisa Hancock
Néstor Medina: Medina will explore the role grassroots popular-church songs played in anti-government resistance movements as a catalyst to bring together social groups and increase socio-contextual awareness in Guatemala during the civil war (1960-1996), highlighting the theological motif of liberation.
David Bjorlin will present “Cooption to Collaboration: Christian Worship Music, Christian Nationalism, and Charlie Kirk” an examination of the enmeshment between Contemporary Worship Music (CWM) and right-wing political movements, especially within White evangelicalism. The recent participation of worship leaders like Phil Wickham and Chris Tomlin at Charlie Kirk’s memorial marked a new era in the politicization of CWM. It serves as an apocalyptic moment that reveals most clearly that Christian Nationalist reality hidden behind the fig leaves of these overt proclamations of Christ’s lordship and reign. In short, the weaponized naivete of these CWM leaders has moved their relationship with political powers from cooption to collaboration. And for those Christian worship leaders who believe they are the ones coopting the political powers to lift the name of Jesus, Bjorlin argues that this has radically shifted the image of this Jesus into the likeness of empire.
Cory Hunter’s paper titled "Sonic Alterities: Musical Constructions of a Transnational Christian Community in Black Gospel Music," argues that gospel artists Kirk Franklin and Kurt Carr engage musical cultures beyond American borders in an effort to sonically construct a transnational community. He explains the stylistic techniques that gospel artists deploy in musically fashioning such a community and the attendant ethical ramifications of such sonic constructions.
Fernando Berwig Silva and Becca Whitla: From their distinct contexts, as a Brazilian student in the USA and as a Canadian academic-practitioner from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Berwig Silva and Whitla reflect on songs of freedom and songs resistance against USA imperialism. They each share vignettes from their own contexts and weave them together theologically.