Afghan holy men aren’t the only ones swinging the wrecking ball these days. Just last Sunday in my suburban Catholic church I came across evidence that cultural vandals are laying waste to Western icons, too. The cantor announced a page number from the hymnal, the organist pulled out the stops, and the congregation began singing what must be the best-loved hymn in the English-speaking world:
Amazing Grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me;
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.
Except that’s not the way it was printed. Now we sing of the amazing grace “that saved and strengthened me.” John Newton’s famous words have apparently been updated because, thanks to a kind of cosmic grade inflation, nobody is a wretch anymore.
My first thought was that this makes the grace a little less amazing. After all, I’m not the epic sinner that Newton was: an 18th-century sailor who deserted from the British Navy and became a slave-trader, before being saved by God’s grace. And I don’t think too many of my fellow parishioners are either. So if we’re really singing about our non-wretched selves — as the termites who’ve chewed the offending language out of our hymnals seem to think we are — then maybe it should just be Adequate Grace or Impressive Grace. But of course, the point of the hymn is that we all are wretches, each in his own way. At least that’s what most Christians thought before the self-esteem movement came along to flatter them.
My second reaction was embarrassment for my co-religionists. Not having a great hymn tradition in this country, Catholics have imported dozens of Protestant chestnuts in recent years. And if its emphasis on human depravity strikes some hymn-selection committee (yes; this sort of damage is always inflicted by committee) as too Calvinist for delicate Catholic sensibilities, then maybe we should just dispense with “Amazing Grace” altogether, as we did for a couple of centuries.
All good hymns are good theology set to music — but Newton’s classic is also a not-bad piece of verse, an autobiographical testimonial, and the focus of 250 years of shared Christian feeling. The hymn’s rewriters are not just retheologizing; they’re tampering with poetry and trampling on history.
But it turns out that Catholics are hardly the sole offenders. The good Benedictine monks at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., who provided the reworded “Amazing Grace” to my church have lots of company. This is an ecumenical search-and-destroy mission. Anglicans do it, and Presbyterians, too. A lot of the work involves gender bending (“Good Christian Men, Rejoice” into “Good Christian Friends, Rejoice”) and de-bellicizing (“Onward Christian Soldiers” has been confined to barracks). The worst of it, though, is the self-esteem incursion.
A professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Brian Abel Ragen, first sounded the alarm in 1994. Not only had the wretches been banished, he discovered, but also the worms. Isaac Watt’s venerable hymn asks:
Alas! and did my Savior bleed
And did my Sovereign die?
Would he devote that sacred Head
For such a worm as I?
Can’t have that. The last line now reads “sinners such as I.” Such changes, Ragen noted, “have more to do with the sensibilities of modern, middle-class Americans than with either traditional Protestant or Catholic beliefs.” A 1997 St. Louis Post-Dispatch account of Ragen’s crusade provides all the gory details of the wrecking crews at work.
“I fought hard in our committee that we needed to keep [the word wretch] because that is how the author felt about himself, a former captain of a slave ship,” said the Rev. Dr. David P. Polk, project editor of the 1995 Chalice Hymnal. . . . The “anti-wretch” flank on his committee “wanted to get away from the kinds of expression in hymns that regarded human beings as lowly, worthless, with low or no self-esteem.”
Anyone with organizational experience can understand what went on here. There are two kinds of people: those with the patience and willingness (masochistic streak?) to serve on committees that meet off and on for four years, and those who lack such patience. Alas, the committee-servers run the world.
The only good thing about the new hymnals is that they’re bound to wear out. American churches tend to be lagging social indicators. The self-esteem movement that is now the rage in churches hit our other institutions about twenty years ago and has long since provoked a counterreaction. If my calculations are correct, in another decade or so, the hymn committees will be less interested in self-esteem than in historic preservation. Authentic period instruments and 18th-century choral settings will be all the rage. And once again it will be the congregation that is wretched, not the hymns.
RICHARD STARR
