Worship Songs for the Disillusioned

I WANT TO believe there’s a live band at a church somewhere in the U.S. playing Joy Oladokun’s latest album, Observations From a Crowded Room. After all, Oladokun is no stranger to sanctuaries: By the time she was 16, Oladokun was leading the worship music at the charismatic nondenominational church her family attended. But around the age of 24, she quit, explaining in an interview with NPR, “I just felt like so much of my attention was going towards taking care of people and singing the right songs and not saying the wrong thing on Sunday.”

I think, for a long time, I’ve been looking for a church willing to risk singing the wrong thing on Sunday—to risk singing something like these lyrics from Oladokun’s “Dust/Divinity”: “I’m a skeptic who still prays / ... ’Cause though it hurts me to believe / It kills me not to / And I am trying to find my way through the middle / And I am desperate to receive every good thing / From now until eternity / From dust until divinity.”

Observations will resonate with all the skeptics who still pray, all the disillusioned and deconstructing Christians looking for an honest hymn. Oladokun (who uses she/they pronouns) also appeals to people from all faiths and no faiths. Their lyrics span many topics (drugs, friendship, racism, mental health) and genres (folk, pop, country, gospel, rap). Their voice, emotive and androgynous, is reminiscent of Tracy Chapman’s, and their lyrical style is confessional, much like their folk/pop contemporaries: boygenius, Lizzie McAlpine, Noah Kahan.

One of the most moving confessions comes in the ballad “Questions, Chaos & Faith”: “When my friend Casey died, I didn’t drive home for the funeral,” she sings of her childhood best friend’s premature death. She continues, “Went to my dorm and cried because I still believed in Heaven / And I was sure I wouldn’t see her when I die.” On social media, Oladokun explained that the people in her life at that time had told her that Casey was going to hell, and she “didn’t yet have the words to say that if heaven didn’t welcome the warmth and chaos of Casey, it probably didn’t have any business existing.”

Well, now Oladokun has the words to articulate a wiser, grayer faith. In the chorus Oladokun sings, “We’re spirit and bone marching to the grave / There are no answers, there are only questions, chaos, and faith.”

Of all the songs on Observations, “No Country” is the most instrumentally sparse and emotionally heavy. Oladokun takes aim at the “Make America Great Again” slogan, singing, “Was your kingdom that great, looking back / or was it bought in blood?” I listened to this track on repeat in the days after Donald Trump was elected president by a majority of voters and majority of Christian voters. So, when Oladokun casts herself as a “stranger living in a foreign land / with no country / nobody to understand,” it hits home. Trumpian ideology, overwhelmingly embraced by Christians, feels foreign to my understanding of the U.S., of decency, of Christianity. That’s why right now “No Country” is the lament I need to hear at church.