Hallelujah” by Underoath, Tuesday, July 16, 2024 (repost)

 Musically, Underoath’s most recent record Voyeurist pays homage to different points in their 25-year career. On the band’s breakthrough album, They’re Only Chasing Safety, Underoath experimented with elements not always heard in Metal. One example was including a church choir on the song “It’s Dangerous Business Walking out Your Front Door.” According to Tim McTague on the episode of Labeled Deep Dives about today’s song “Hallelujah,” the Underoath guitarist said he made up a story about how the 2004 single had religious significance in order to record a youth choir in a church basement. Eighteen years later, the second song on Voyeurist prominently features a choir, this time in the chorus. But unlike “Dangerous,” Underoath had distanced themselves from the Christian music scene.  In an interview with Loudwire, Tim says that “Hallelujah” is about “struggles with everything – faith, life and so on.”  The presence of a choir on “Hallelujah” and the track’s title serve as a kind of musical and lyrical contrast. The lyrics offer title hope, except for the line superimposed on the song: “Hallelujah.” The song is an interesting approach to songwriting; interpolating religious themes from the band’s past and re-contextualizing them.

WE’RE NOT DREAMING, THIS IS HELL. Hallelujah is a Hebrew word taken from the scriptures. The word’s most frequent occurrence is in the book of Psalms, the book of poetry that was often sung. Throughout the ages, countless songs have used this word or its Greek variant alleluia, usually in a religious context. From the Gregorian Chant of the Middle Ages to the Christian hymns of the 19th century to the most moving part of George Frideric Handel’s The Messiah, the word Hallelujah alludes to worshiping the Judeo-Christian God. But in 1984, when singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen released his single “Hallelujah,” which has been covered by countless artists, the singer reappropriated the word into a secular setting. The song was a new standard that both people of faith and people of doubt could resonate with. The first two verses of the song tell a story from the Hebrew Bible (or the Old Testament), about David and Samson, two men who have been judged for moral failure by readers and theologians. The third verse of the song addresses the speaker’s doubt, saying “Maybe there’s a God above.” Of course, Cohen’s “Hallelujah” doesn’t take the word completely out of its religious context. And neither does Underoath, a band who will be writing about their deconversion story until they break up. Lyrically, Underoath’s “Hallelujah” deals with the feeling of alienation after deconstruction. There’s bitterness due to the rules that the Christian music industry imposed on artists like Underoath. There’s anger toward the industry that covered up frontman Spenser Chamberlain’s drug addiction in order to continue making money on the band’s financial success. And there’s disappointment in a church that fosters an environment that says it wants honesty, but ultimately the honest get screwed. 

THIS MADNESS MAY BE IN MY HEAD. Underoath isn’t alone in their deconstruction movement. Many former Christian bands and musicians end up in a place of doubt and recontextualization. In the past, the mainstream of Christianity dismissed this deviation as heresy. Denominations and cults started or individuals rejected religion or merely embraced an individualized spirituality. But never did the aggregate have to acknowledge the reasons why someone left the mainstream if they could just call that person a heretic. Today entire communities are forming around talking about religious trauma. There are deconstruction and ex-vangelical communities almost in the same way that there are denominations. There are probably as many reasons why people deconstruct their faith as there are deconstructionists. Common themes these days revolve around political Christianity, race, gender, and sexuality. Underoath’s “Hallelujah” makes me think of several stories in my own faith journey, but today I’m fixated on the contradiction I felt from reading William Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Experience in my Christian university. The poem critiques the Industrial Revolution for its human toll on the poor, in the case of the poem, the children of the poor who had to work sweeping the chimneys. Many of the children died in accidents or contracted lung cancer. Rather than focusing on the need for social justice and the fact that this horrendous exploitation happened in a Christian country and that Blake appealed to the Christian compassion of his readers, the professor teaching the class merely scoffed at the literature and focused on Blake’s unorthodox, heretical religion. Eventually, the human suffering would be alleviated through ungodly socialism, we would learn in the course. The ungodly part wasn’t in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, but the instructor’s take on it. The words of Blake, though, reminded me of the Christianity that I wanted to be a part of, preached by Stephen Christian, Bono, and Underoath at the time. But it seems more and more that my professor’s downplaying human suffering is where Christianity has headed. No wonder more people are turning out like William Blake.

Music visualizer:

Digital Ghost performance:

Lyric video

The version featuring Charlotte Sands:

Read the lyrics on Genius.