Little by little, I have come to a realization that (as someone I read on youtube articulated it) “Holy shit, I think I’m a Miley Cyrus fan.” It’s been a long time coming, and by no means implies interest in everything she’s ever done. If you think this sounds absurd, click on this link, which is what put me decisively over the top into Team Miley—a cover of “Zombie” which is the antithesis of the half-hearted or saccharine music that I was complaining about a few days ago, and sung with amazing power and virtuosity.
Miley deserves a longer reflection than what makes sense today, and I’ve been working on that. However, since we’ve recently been on the subject of what makes a great song about Lutheran theology, I propose for this series a duet between Miley and her sister Noah, who wrote this song. It’s called “I Got So High That I Saw Jesus.”
That sounds like a snarky or ironic joke, but as you will see if you click, I’m pretty sure it is not any more ironic than an average country song about Jesus—and I’m 99% sure it we don’t necessarily have to read it as ironic at all.
It comes across as dead serious and sincere: I was in despair. I got high, not figuratively but literally. I had what I honestly felt was a conversation with Jesus. He told me—as a revelation, not a joke—that everything would be okay. I just need him in my heart, plus Tennessee whiskey and love. I believed him. I wrote this song about it. Period.
Miley and the Ironies of Country Music Spirituality
Obviously, this is supposed to be slightly provocative and is not designed to be sung by an average church choir. Yet I submit that, at this level of irony, it is par for the course in country music. (As social critique it is much stronger than average, addressing global warming and the loss of jobs to machines). For example, check out this recent hit, “Worship You.” (“Your kisses have a higher power…I want to glorify every part of you so bad.”) Over and over, country artists use theological terms to express whatever they want to say, however pious or blasphemous. Sometimes it is playful sexual banter like “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away” or bad jokes like “Dropkick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life.” Sometimes it is playing gospel standards like “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” or “Amazing Grace” with vanishingly low interest in whether the performers or fractions of the audience have any piety worth mentioning, in whatever senses this may be true.
Often there are layers of irony within ironies. In Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried,” the protagonist, in retrospect, sings that he regrets that he earlier had been proud to be a sinner instead of listening to his mother’s “Sunday learning.” This neglect has landed him in prison. This may be ironically defiant, tinged with masculine reprobate pride. Still, some people probably assume that his regret is sincere… but then they may go on to cover “Mama Tried” intending an ironic joke about that… but then their listeners may take Merle’s mother’s advice (not the cover’s snarkiness) to heart… ad infinitum.
In another classic case, the Grateful Dead covered Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” (“We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee…we like living right and being free”). Even if we leave the Dead out of it, Haggard supposedly composed this song while high. Also, the song overtly celebrates illegal moonshine.
Nevertheless, such songs do presuppose a recognizably Christian language and common sense, even if they imagine stretching it or rebelling against it—and of course a sizable fraction of the performers and audiences do presuppose sincere piety, even if they also worship hot sex with their partners inside or outside of church-sanctioned nuclear families. (On this latter front, Miley has been in a straight marriage—albeit during the most drug-addled stage of her life—but is also outspoken about her gender-fluidity.)
In this context, there is not anything especially remarkable about “I Got So High that I Saw Jesus,” even as country music. I watched Willie Nelson on CNN just last night, reminiscing about how he got busted the day before he performed for Jimmy Carter at the White House.
Miley’s Emerging Sound Palette and the Politics of Memory
This is before we consider how the song relates to less “country” parts of Miley’s persona. True, she is the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, god-daughter of Dolly Parton, and excellent performer of Dolly’s anthem “Jolene.” To my mind she looks like Dolly, somewhat motherly toward Noah, in the “I Got So High” performance.
But, in case anyone doesn’t already know this, it was Miley’s flamboyant break with being a child Disney star by performing sexed-up pop that brought her mass-market fame. One minor milestone on this path was performing “Doo It!” (“Yeah I smoke pot/yeah I love peace/but I don’t give a fuck/I ain’t no hippie!”) at the Grammy Awards with a stage full of dancers in drag. As I write, Miley is on the cover of the Rolling Stone, talking about how she regrets that the music part of her art got lost amid the over-the-top theatricality of this stage, and also how she recommends being sober (although she may want to try ayahuasca again some day.)
I wholeheartedly concur with her comment about focusing on the music, and lately Miley has caught my ear for her choice of extremely interesting and proficient covers. It is fascinating to hear her blend her (mainly) pop and (partly) country voice with a reinvention of styles by pioneering female rockers like Joan Jett and Debbie Harry.
This is where the “Zombie” cover re-enters our discussion. She is bringing back some of the most innovative and commendable parts of the music scene from back in the 1980’s—a critical moment in music’s digestion of second wave feminism. This was the era when Madonna, the leader among many others, was transforming our imagination of what feminist-inflected music could be.
But now, in Miley’s rethinking of this—bundling Madonna, Joan Jett, and Dolly Parton, plus her own distinctive voice, into one original package– we have Miley’s far superior vocal prowess, compared to Madonna’s, and a powerfully assertive rock sound palette. This doesn’t strike me like Lady Gaga’s “Madonna retread” stage which was OK but ultimately boring because it copied so much rather than innovating. (Later Gaga, to me, is a separate issue.) Recent Miley sounds to me much fresher—a sound that taps into memory while also pushing us forward. And she is still only 28 years old. It seems clear that she has something fresh and interesting to say, and will not be a one-hit-wonder pop star “aging out” of the industry before she finds her mature voice.
Miley as Pot-Smoking Lutheran Theologian
“I Got So High that I Saw Jesus” is fairly peripheral to the “holy shit, I think I’ve become a Miley fan” train of thought I pursued in the last section, which deserves a separate article.
However, the song holds up on its own. And there is one thing about it that is noteworthy about its religious messaging within country music—its implicit theological understanding is hardcore Lutheran!
I suppose not too many readers here want to get deep into theology—that is, focused reflection on how best to think about what counts as sacred—and especially not get lost in the weeds of debate about Martin Luther’s distinctive polemics within a range of Christian theologies.
But bear with me, it’s worth it. There is a broad distinction between Catholic and Protestant theologies. Catholics stress church institutions and rituals as boundary-enforcers and intermediaries—so if, for example, Miley wants to have a connection with Jesus she should try confession in the Catholic church first and priest-administered sacraments second.
On the other side, Protestant theologies stress how such mediations (especially when they are compromised in the ways Catholics and Baptists frequently are) get in the way of such connections. Luther called this getting sidetracked by “works” whereas “grace” was the point, and variants of this same distinction loom large in other world religious traditions.
In this regard the Miley and Noah’s song ratchets up Protestant sensibilities to an extreme.
Meanwhile there is a wide continuum within the notoriously schism-prone Protestants. At one pole are people who stress how, in the terms of this song, “everything is gonna be OK” simply because that is what the universe (“God’s will”) is like at the root. That’s irrespective of anything that Miley and Noah, or Mitch McConnell, have done to mess things up or set things right.
The jargon terms here are “redemption” and “grace.” This theological camp adds that human nature is such that Miley et. al. are naturally prone to mess things up more, the harder they try, so they could not possibly attain a state of grace on their own.
This is classic Lutheran ideology. You get grace because Jesus says so, and because the importance of his life was to show us what the universe is like, period. That’s no matter how screwed up you are. (This is also a Quaker sensibility that could link us back to my Sydney Carter remake.) In light of this grace, one would naturally expect a response along the lines of what Miley and Noah flag as “love”—and/or gratitude, compassion, Miley’s Happy Hippie Foundation, and so on. Yet, for classic Luther, such a response is somewhat optional, or at least secondary, and distinct from the “everything’s gonna be OK” part.
Remember when I earlier suggested that Christmas angels and/or Kanye should not shower grace indiscriminately on everyone, including King Herod and Donald Trump, but should chant down Babylon instead, then wait to celebrate until after Babylon falls?
That was not a hard-core Lutheran logic. For that we should leave out the angel’s caveat of “peace to all those with whom God is pleased” (not including Herod) or stipulate that the caveat is redundant because God is pleased with everyone.
Most country religion assumes a different brand of Protestantism, which is considerably less Lutheran in this sense. It puts stress on things you have to do: above all repent of your sins (often with hellfire as a threat), be “born-again,” and practice “good Christian behavior.” When Travis Tritt sang about rebelling against the “laws of the Bible Belt,” he presupposed something like this.
Even “Amazing Grace, that saved a wretch like me” is typically understood to be somewhat conditional on repenting and cleaning up your life. It would be objectively ironic to sing “Amazing Grace” if one had no intention of stopping one’s sinning—whether or not this consciously registered as ironic, given how much the song is taken for granted in country, like the wallpaper.)
Don’t worry, I am aware that Lutheran practice is more than theology. It is also ritual and custom, so it can’t simply be conflated with pot-smoking mysticism. Nor should we fail to note that Miley and Noah can be read as “seekers” in a New Age vein, however much infected by country’s hegemonic spirituality. This leads to a good question for another day—how much of the “spiritual but not religious” discourse is implicitly reworking an underlying Protestant common sense?
Still … all good Lutherans know that Luther said, “While we sit and drink our beer, God makes his kingdom come.” Who would have thought that Miley Cyrus would become a standard-bearer for this understanding of “everything’s gonna be okay” for the new millennium?
NOTE: this was in my "12 songs of Christmas" series so I tagged it there; it has paragraphs from a piece in the Encyclopedia of the Reception of the Bible so I tagged it for oldies but goodies too. I also gave a lecture about this at the IASPM international conference in 2023.
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