Larry Norman evidently took "Why should the devil have all the good music" and his anti-middle class stance directly from The Salvation Army of 1880

 Such stories [of its militancy] were common in the early decades of the Salvation Army. Whatever the Booths and their soldiers were, they were not content with a genteel and respectable Christianity that fit snugly into the cultural milieu of the day. William Booth once said, “The great curse of the church is respectability. Throw reputation and so-called respectability overboard.”  Despite using common and popular forms – such as the military metaphor and changing words of popular songs (“Why should the devil have all the best tunes?” Salvationists often asked) – the Army subverted expectations of what Christians should be and took much criticism. 

More.

Larry Norman's spiritual movement was quickly co-opted by the business of Christian music in just the same way that the Salvation Army's specifically religious character came to be swallowed up by its charitable business. 

There is nothing new under the sun.

 

 

Laser-focused middle class Christianity Today finds the speck in a brother's eye, doesn't like it when the poors complain

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is there no minimum wage? Is there no welfare? Do we not pay taxes?

 

Ryan Burge discovers what Larry Norman always knew: Church is middle class, a hospital for the healthy

 The group that is the most likely to attend services are not the poor, nor the wealthy. Instead, it’s people who smack in the middle of the income distribution. This analysis points to the following conclusion: the people who are the most likely to attend services this weekend are those with college degrees making $60K-$100K. In other words, middle class professionals. ...

Increasingly religion has become the enclave for those who have lived a “proper” life. College degree, middle class income, married with children. If you check all those boxes, the likelihood of you regularly attending church is about double the rate of folks who don’t.

Data here.

Rod Dreher on the naive progressivism of Joseph Ratzinger, the now deceased Pope Benedict XVI

 Here: 

In other words, his progressivism consisted of wanting to make Catholic orthodoxy comprehensible to the modern world -- not in wanting to overturn those orthodoxies! The book goes on to talk about his shock in the years immediately following the Council to see how people within the Church used "the spirit of Vatican II" as a pretext to dismantle Catholicism. Ratzinger, a good-hearted soul who expected the best from others, had been terribly naive. 

It wasn't just Ratzinger, however.

The same phenomenon occurred in Protestantism, and in politics.

President Ronald Reagan, for example, had campaigned in the 1970s on libertarian economic orthodoxies, in particular on cutting ordinary income tax rates because he believed people were better judges of what to do with their money than was government. He won in landslides.

But as Ratzinger never anticipated how nefarious forces in the church would use their freedom to indulge sinful human nature, Reagan never anticipated how rich people and corporations would use their tax savings windfalls to invest abroad instead of in the United States, shipping millions of formerly good middle class jobs abroad to cheaper labor markets, hollowing out the country and growing thereby even more fabulously rich in the process.

Underestimating sinful human nature has been the story of our times.

 

 

 

 

Church is middle-class

A proposed definition of "middle class" for The Devil's Dictionary

Middle class 

n. The economic class situated between the working class and the upper class, uglier than either for combining the worst features of the other two into one. It has just enough leisure at once to dream of being the idle rich, and to loathe those who do not.  

Christ Mad? Perhaps. But Still Right.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 But is there anyone here, right now, who can explain to me . . . Is Christ a myth? A madman's whim? Some say Christ can cure our sin. Is there a way to contact Him? Or will I die not knowing how? Listen, I only came to church to see if they could offer hope, but everything that happened there was way outside my scope. Like afterwards, outside . . . was a beggar on the grass. He held out his hand, and people'd smile, then they'd pass. I'm sure he reached for something real, for something more than cash. He begged them for a little cheer, and they all pretended . . . not to hear. I get the message, loud and clear: Church is middle-class.

-- Larry Norman, "Poem", Street Level (1970)