A Taylor Swift-ematics

Christ haunted South, South haunted Christ

Gentle reader,

It’s another Taylor Swift moment, bringing with it another barrage of takes on Swift.

I like her music, but my interest in writing about Swift rests mostly in her power as cultural phenomenon. She bridges generations. (I like her; my kids love her.) She’s savvy about culture and about business. And, according to some-Christians-on-the-internet, she’s the most vile cultural power since the invention of the novel.

The intensity of fervor against Swift feels new. (A recent piece I wrote about Swift evoked the harshest internet comments I’ve ever received.) As a theologian, I’m interested in any cultural text with such reach and resonance. What might Christians make of Swift’s popularity and what of the lyrics in her newest album, which use Christian language and imagery in ways that criticize the church?

Lament over broken relationship is the most pervasive theme of Swift’s body of work. Again and again, she sings of loss and betrayal, and behind that loss, we feel a deep longing for fidelity, a longing to be the beloved who will be loved no matter what may come.

“Your faithless love’s the only hoax/I believe in.” (“Hoax”)

“Forever is the sweetest con” (“Cowboy like me”)

“And you call me up again/just to break me like a promise.” (“All too well”)

Swift ties love stories together with Christian imagery. Plenty of other popular music does the same; think of Beyoncé’s “Halo” or Hozier’s “Take me to church.” Such a use is in the air we breathe, and I don’t think that it’s altogether wrong. Scripture uses human love as a central metaphor for the divine-human relationship; for just three examples, note Hosea, Ephesians, and Revelation.

“And right there where we stood/was holy ground. (“Holy ground”)

“I made you my temple, my mural, my sky.” (“Tolerate it”)

“I hosted parties and starved my body/Like I’d be saved by a perfect kiss” (“You’re on your own, kid”)

Unlike Hozier¹ or certain bad Christian theologies of sexuality, Swift has the ability to separate the experience of human love from the truth about God (whatever she thinks that truth might be.) In “False God,” she sings she’d “die for you” and invokes getting lost by “blind faith.”

“The altar is my hips/Even if it’s a false god.”

At her most iconic and on the nose Swift sings a “love story.” But love stories don’t always have happy endings. Romeo and Juliet don’t get one, despite their appearance in Swift’s most cotton-candy flavored song, and Swift herself has long known this is “not a fairytale.”

“you be the prince and I’ll be the princess” (“Love story”)

We are creatures who desire. We yearn. We long. Swift diagnoses the human condition as one in which we want. We’re wanting wanters. It’s downright Augustinian.

“all you wanted was to be wanted.” (“Fifteen”)

Swift wants a love that lasts, and she wants it body and soul. I suspect Swift’s enormous popularity rests, in part, in her reiteration of the basic truth of human wanting. It’s not just Taylor who wants; we all do, and our longing is never purely spiritual, so Swift’s unapologetic lyrics of wanting strike a chord.

Such art has always made Christians nervous, but we might also diagnose it as a bit of deeply realist and life-affirming truth. Humans aren’t just soul creatures. We’re psychosomatic—body and soul—and everything we do and want is done and wanted body and soul together. Such a claim is classically Christian, because Christian faith acknowledges creation as the good work of the good Creator and human embodiment as part of that goodness.

“I’d meet you where the spirit meets the bones/In a faith forgotten land.” (“Ivy”)

But we don’t just want. Our wanting goes wrong. We hurt others, and others hurt us. Swift hasn’t found the love she seeks. (This painful contrast between fallible human love and divine fidelity is part of the power of scriptural use of the comparison.)

When we feel wanting gone wrong, we feel it in specifically gendered ways. The phenomenon that is Taylor Swift has always been about sex and gender. I think another part of Swift’s draw comes in her paradigmatic girliness. Swift is the (white, rich, conventionally beautiful) all-American girl, with her long legs and blond mane. She’s stereotypical Barbie.

This is so true that it’s easy to reduce her to it, making her an avatar for femininity and all our positive and negative feelings and hopes and desires in relationship to it. We love it. We hate it. We want to be it. We want to touch it. We despair of possessing it. We despise and destroy and revere and worship it.

“I got cursed like Eve got bitten/Oh, was it punishment?” (“Prophecy”)

Swift sings of a felt need to hide the urgency of her wanting. No one wants a needy girl. There’s no judgment quite so neat as that which condemns a woman as “high maintenance.”

“I fake a smile so he won’t see/that I want and I’m needing.” (“Teardrops on my guitar”)

And women are judged for wanting. Girls are supposed to adorn ourselves so we’ll be wanted, to behave in a desirable manner, but wanting too much isn’t ladylike. It’s a small gap, that between desirable desire and consignment as a slut, a whore. What kind of a girl wants all that fame? All that money? Who is she to pour out all these words and feelings? (And so profligate? A double album?!?!? The critics call out, where is her editor? Someone, get this girl in line.) Swift’s wanting can be received as a violation of girlness or as a welcome expansion of it.

“They tell you while you're young/‘Girls, go out and have your fun’/Then they hunt and slay the ones who actually do it/Criticize the way you fly.” (“Nothing new”)

And if a woman wants more than love? If she’s also ambitious, if she wants money or power or career? She’s in for another kind of thoroughly gendered judgement.

Religious language reappears. It’s there for desire; it’s also there for condemnation.

“They’re burning all the witches, even if you aren’t one/They got their pitchforks and proof, their receipts and reasons” (“I did something bad”)

Stereotypical Barbie is supposed to choose wanting love over wanting to sing. If she hasn’t found prince charming, it’s her fault for promiscuous wanting.

“He wanted a bride/I was making my own name.” (“Midnight rain”)

“Your picket fence is sharp as knives” (“High infidelity”)

When Swift sings of gendered ways she lives in the story of wanting, many women resonate. We respond to hearing her voice the effects of sexism and misogyny in a way much more visceral than a professor can do when she writes a sentence containing a phrase like “effects of sexism and misogyny.”

As Swift’s career matures, the love story continues to go wrong for the individual, but brokenness is also attributed to the church, which emerges in Swift’s lyrics as hypocritical judge, condemning women for desire.

“If you never touched me I would’ve/Gone along with the righteous/If I never blushed then they could’ve/Never whispered about this” (Would’ve, could’ve, should’ve)

The righteous will no longer have her, and the unfaithful lover is “a crisis of my faith.”

Let’s look at Swift’s newest lyrics, those most under fire from Christian critics:

In “But Daddy I love him,” we get a shadowed reiteration of the early “Love story,” and it is the women of the church who emerge to condemn the singer with her “wild boy and all this wild joy.”

“Sarahs and Hannahs in their Sunday best/Clutching their pearls, sighing, ‘What a mess’/I just learned these people try and save you/’Cause they hate you.”

“Guilty as sin” borrows Christological images, expressing a deep hurt at churchly condemnation. Even if the singer were to “roll the stone away,” “they’re gonna crucify me anyway.”

“What if the way you hold me is actually what's holy?/If long-suffering propriety is what they want from me/They don’t know how you’ve haunted me so stunningly/I choose you and me religiously”

Swift’s assessment of the church is condemnation of false piety and judgmental distancing. It’s of a church that has no room for embodied desire, the church that never “spared a prayer” for the woman judged fallen.

“They knew, they knew, they knew the whole time/That I was onto somethin’/The family, the pure greed, the Christian chorus line/They all said nothin’” (“Cassandra”)

New Testament Scholar Madison Pierce writes about Swift’s breakup with the church, identifying, in women in girls, a need for:

“an empathetic witness to help them process…a woman may feel isolated in her experiences of sexism, double standards, and even abuse; a woman may even be isolated further through gaslighting and excuses and retaliation.”

Pierce continues,

“So why Taylor Swift? Why can’t we find a more ‘wholesome’ prophet? Because there isn’t one. For some reason, the CCM isn’t cranking out albums addressing the wage gap or discrimination or spiritual abuse, and to my knowledge, no Christian artist is.”

“’Cause if I was a man, then I’d be the man” (“The man”)

It’s no surprise to find popular music make use of Christian language, especially in the land of Swift’s roots, the “Christ haunted South” of country music. The phrase is Flannery O’Connor’s:

“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”²

I’m not saying Swift is expressing orthodox Christian theology or that she has a healthy Christian understanding of love, and I’m not saying Swift is an O’Connor. That doesn’t mean she can’t call out some truth. Swift inhabits O’Connor’s world, and she discloses that world for us.

(I don’t mean to pick on the South exclusively here; the whole United States is implicated, though Southern culture has some features that make the thing particularly stark.)

Swift’s pearl clutching “Sarahs and Hannahs” share plenty in common with a character like O’Connor’s Mrs. Turpin in her story “Revelation” (see The Complete Stories). It’s gospel music that’s playing on the radio, when O’Connor has the girl who’s been to the North throw her book at that respectable church lady. Revealing something broken in Christianity is not the same thing as mocking Christianity.

“I don’t like your kingdom keys” (“I don’t like your perfect crime”)

The South may be Christ haunted, but it’s equally true that the Southern Christ—and the American Christ—is South haunted. He is haunted by false religiosity and easy platitudes, by “bless your hearts” that mask contempt, and steady church-going that pretends away a history and present of race based oppression. He’s haunted by authoritarian beliefs about church leadership that do enormous harm to women, by abuse in his name. He’s haunted by prudish pretention and social convention which consigns some women to fallenness, outside the realm of grace. Our American Jesus is haunted by false prosperity gospel promises, by machismo masquerading as masculinity, and by whiteness pretending to purity.  

“Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature.” — Flannery O’Connor

True fidelity loves through brokenness. It embraces the loved one’s whole story, beauty and flaw, accomplishment and disaster. The church of Jesus Christ is to be there for all of us, welcoming our whole stories and our desire, extending grace after grace.

“My reputation's never been worse, so/You must like me for me.” (“Delicate”)

We want. We want to be wanted. We want to rest in unconditional belovedness. We want vows that are kept and churches without hypocrisy. We to be able to use our talents and still be able to love and be loved. And we women want in ways that are colored by our experience of sex and gender in a misogynistic world.

Our hearts are restless. (Augustine, Confessions, 1.1). We’re yearning for the faithful Lover of our souls, the end of our desires, the keeper of promises. Taylor Swift helps me remember all of that.

“Sacred new beginnings/That became my religion” (“Cornelia Street”)

Grace & peace,

BFJ

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Flannery O’Connor’s Complete Stories.

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1. "The only Heaven I'll be sent to/Is when I'm alone with you.”

2. Flannery O’Connor, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, ed. Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald.