"In a spirited polemic, John Stackhouse complains about the stupidity of contemporary Christian hymns: 'We are the most educated Christians in history, and yet our lyrics are considerably stupider than our much less educated Christian forebears.'""I sympathise with Stackhouse’s complaints. But in all fairness, I think the majority of hymns have always been pretty stupid. If we think the 19th century (for example) was full of great hymn-writers, it's just because our hymnbooks today include only the highlights from that entire century. And let's face it, even the highlights are usually pretty atrocious. Hymns typically suffer either from painfully bad lyrics or from a trivial, no-less-painful sentimentality."
"The great hymns-- and there are so few great hymns: if you subtract the Christmas carols and Charles Wesley, there's hardly anything left-- are always the exception. For strange and mysterious reasons, these hymns awaken our feelings of reverence and love and thanksgiving and joy. In spite of the fact that they are hymns, they somehow manage to communicate truth and to evoke deep feeling."
"Furthermore, it's worth noting that our more progressive contemporary churches have actually invented a brand new way of writing bad hymns: these are the hymns that sound not so much like worship as the recitation of an official policy document. All the fashionable leftist causes are celebrated and affirmed with solemn sincerity; everything is carefully included, so that the entire song unfolds with all the humourless deliberation of a meeting of the committee of management. As I said, there are several kinds of bad hymns; but these ones are probably the worst of all (even though it is a genuine achievement to have invented an entirely new way of writing badly)."
You can read Ben Myers' entire post, "Are our hymns becoming stupider?" here.
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