u/jcmib

(FYI: I’m in town for completely different reasons, I’m seeing him next month in Hershey. )

How a song about Primitive Baptists became a soundtrack for the influencer age.

Walking around Chicago this week, it was impossible to miss the Tyler Childers fans in town for his sold out show at Wrigley.
Cowboy hats. Boots. Flowy dresses. Concert shirts. Groups of friends making their way through the city. Later that evening, my TikTok feed filled with videos from people getting ready for the show. Outfit checks. Dance clips. Lip syncing. Strutting down sidewalks as if they were stepping onto a stage.
The soundtrack, over and over again, was “Way of the Triune God.”

What a century.

When I say “What a century,” I do not mean the song is one hundred years old. I mean that we are living through one of the strangest centuries in human history.

A song describing a style of worship that predates electricity is now being promoted by algorithms. A tradition that emerged in an era of horses and handwritten letters now travels through fiber optic cables and wireless networks. Young adults create thirty second videos of themselves singing about the Triune God and instantly distribute them around the world.
Nobody involved in those original church services could have imagined this.

And yet here we are.
There is something fascinating about watching people perform for an audience while singing along to a song about a form of Christianity that would have viewed self promotion with deep suspicion.

Social media has created a world where attention functions as a form of currency. Views, likes, shares, follows. Visibility has become a form of value. Entire industries now exist around being seen.

“Way of the Triune God” comes from almost the opposite direction.
The song draws heavily from Primitive Baptist traditions, a branch of Christianity known for simple worship, congregational singing, and a commitment to carrying on practices handed down through generations. Most Primitive Baptists would share many theological convictions with conservative evangelicals. Yet culturally they often operate very differently.
They are not known for massive outreach campaigns, church growth strategies, branding efforts, or marketing plans. Their congregations tend to be rooted in family, tradition, and community. They know who they are. They know how they worship. They carry on from one generation to the next.
That stands in contrast to much of the modern American religious landscape.
Today, churches often compete for attention in the same crowded marketplace as everything else. Congregations gather in school gyms, warehouses, storefronts, and sprawling campuses. Many carry names such as Hope, River, Journey, Cornerstone, or Seeds. The words are meaningful, but the meaning often depends on who is using them. Two churches may share the same vocabulary while believing and practicing very different things.
Childers points toward something much older and much more specific.

Not generic spirituality.

Not vague inspiration.

Not “living your best life.”

A song about the Trinity. A song about church. A song rooted in a distinct theological tradition.
And somehow it became a viral soundtrack.

Part of that is Tyler Childers himself. He may be one of the most old fashioned artists built perfectly for the modern age.

His music is steeped in tradition without becoming trapped by nostalgia. His songs contain drinkers, addicts, lovers, seekers, believers, doubters, and ordinary people trying to make sense of life. One song may deal with addiction. Another with lost love. Another with speaking in tongues. Another with transcendence. Another with faith. He understands something many artists miss. Human beings rarely fit neatly into categories.

That gives listeners room to enter the music from different directions.
Some hear theology.
Some hear culture.
Some hear family history.
Some hear a catchy chorus.
Some hear all of those things at once.
And to be fair, “Way of the Triune God” is fun to sing. The rhythm pulls you along. The chorus invites participation. It is easy to understand why thousands of people would want it playing while they get ready for a concert.

Still, I cannot help smiling at the image.
Young adults in cowboy boots and wide brim hats. Recording themselves on phones. Practicing dances. Perfecting camera angles. Posting clips for audiences they may never meet.
All while singing a song describing a style of worship that would have been familiar to churchgoers two hundred years ago.

The technology changed.

The audience changed.

The purpose may have changed.

Yet somehow the song survived the journey.
There is one more irony.
Primitive Baptists have never been especially concerned with getting everyone’s attention. They have generally been content to worship, raise families, pass along traditions, and continue in the faith as they understand it. They were not trying to go viral.
Yet through Tyler Childers, a song celebrating that tradition found its way into one of the most attention driven environments ever created.
The algorithm has many strange pathways.
One of them apparently leads straight to a Primitive Baptist church service.
What a century.

I grew up attending an SBC church, and a fundamentalist Christian school. Both were very big on evangelism going to people‘s door invite him to the church, but also public displays of outreach, if you can call it that, like sidewalk demonstrations, and going to march for life. Most of the time we were told that only evangelical were actual true Christians, because of the whole faith versus works discussion among other things. That is to say even religious people that consider themselves Christian and attended services regularly( let’s say Catholics and Mainline Protestants) were still not “true”Christians.

Which got me thinking, there is a Christian group that is not evangelical at all, and adjust their lifestyle around hard work, which they associate with their faith. For some reason, they never came up as a group to witness to: the Amish. Maybe it’s how much that community has committed to that specific expression of faith, in addition to the newfound fascination with the. “Trad-wife”trend, but for a group that not only does not evangelize or try to get anyone else in their fold, one could say the antithesis of “be in the world, not of it”. Even their theology does not have the biblical scholarship that has found anywhere else.

I live in the mid Atlantic region, and there are Amish groups in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. So from my personal experience growing up in the evangelical environment, the Amish has always been a fascinating group, and for a group that specifically does not evangelize and does not try to convert, they seem to get a level of respect that other non-evangelical Christian groups do not.

The Church That Stayed

Today was the last Sunday of Pride Month.
Yesterday, our church had people at the Pride celebration in Dover. That mattered to me. Not because it was flashy. Not because it fixes everything. It mattered because it showed something simple and needed.
There are Christians who do not see queer people as a problem to solve.
There are Christians who do not believe LGBTQ people are living in error.
There are Christians who want queer people to have full access to the life of the church. Ministry. Marriage. Leadership. Clergy. Community. Belonging.
And I sat with that this morning.
I sat in a church with a Pride flag out front. A Pride flag in the bulletin. A congregation that has made a visible choice. And I kept thinking about the story people tell about churches like this.
The story usually goes like this.
Affirming churches are losing people.
Denominations that support LGBTQ inclusion are shrinking.
Churches that accept queer clergy and same-sex marriage are paying the price.
And maybe there is some truth there. I do not want to pretend there has been no cost. There has been. People have left. Churches have split. Denominations have fractured. Families have argued. Congregations have grieved.
But I also wonder if that story is incomplete.
Because church attendance is declining almost everywhere. Many people did not grow up with expected church attendance at all. Others did grow up in church and left because they were hurt, used, shamed, controlled, or spiritually manipulated.
Religious trauma is real.
For some people, leaving church was not rebellion. It was survival.
So when people leave evangelicalism, fundamentalism, or any faith system that harmed them, it makes sense that they may want nothing to do with church again. It makes sense that some people lump all Christians together. If the only Christianity you have known is the version that wounded you, then of course the whole thing looks dangerous.
I understand that.
But I also think something gets missed when every Christian gets placed in the same category.
I live in a strange middle place.
For some people on the far right, I am not Christian enough. I attend a United Methodist church with a Pride flag out front. That alone marks me, in their eyes, as compromised or heretical.
For some people on the far left, the fact that I still call myself Christian at all is the problem. To them, Christianity is tied so closely to exclusion, anti-LGBTQ politics, racism, patriarchy, and control that any public expression of Christian faith feels suspect.
So where does that leave people like me?
People who are faithful and affirming.
People who believe in Jesus and also believe queer people should be fully welcomed.
People who take Scripture seriously, but do not believe Scripture should be used as a weapon.
People who remain Christian without accepting cruelty as a requirement of faith.
There is not always an easy name for us. There is not a catchy label that fully explains it. But we exist.
And I think we matter.
Maybe affirming churches are not only losing people.
Maybe they are also revealing who stayed.
Maybe they are becoming clearer.
Maybe they are smaller in some places, but more honest.
Maybe this is less like decline and more like a reset.
Because if a church loses people over LGBTQ inclusion, that is painful. But it also raises a question.
Who remains?
The people who remain may be people who have chosen a faith that does not require someone else’s exclusion. They may be people who want to follow Jesus without denying the dignity of their neighbors. They may be queer Christians who never thought they would find a church where they could bring their whole selves. They may be parents, siblings, friends, pastors, teachers, therapists, and ordinary believers who are tired of seeing faith used to push people away from God.
That is not nothing.
It may be smaller than the old version.
But smaller does not mean meaningless.
There has never been a time when more queer Christians have had space to express their faith openly. There have never been more churches willing to say, clearly and publicly, that queer people belong. There have never been more congregations willing to recognize the gifts of LGBTQ people instead of treating them as exceptions, problems, or debates.
Is the opposition still loud?
Yes.
Is affirming Christianity still a minority position in many places?
Yes.
Will this remain difficult for a long time?
Most likely.
But the other fact remains.
There are churches where queer people can worship, lead, marry, preach, serve, sing, pray, and be known.
There are churches where people recovering from religious harm can slowly test whether faith still has anything gentle left in it.
There are churches where the Pride flag is not decoration. It is a signal.
A signal that says, “You do not have to choose between your faith and your life.”
That matters.
So maybe the question is not only, “How many people left?”
Maybe the better question is, “What kind of church is being built by the people who stayed?”
Because if what remains is a community of people committed to faith, humility, repair, and full inclusion, then maybe this is not only a story of loss.
Maybe it is also a beginning.

I work in schools, so I have a similar work calendar as the teachers and other staff in the building. Which means that my workload drops off a lot during the summer. I’m a therapist that visits kids at school and so I do see a couple kids during the summer at the library and such, but in reality, I’ll have a lot of free time. I usually devote a little bit of time for further education classes and such but I wanted to introduce some fun things to my life this summer. So here is the prompt that I asked GPT to use.

“Based on what you know about me suggest 10 new activities for me to try this summer that would lineup with my interest/abilities/patience”

Granted, most of the suggestions could be considered Oscar bait, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that to make this list. My example would be Mark Wahlberg, one of his earlier roles was in PTA’s boogie nights. Since then he is a movie making machine usually in 3 to 4 movies a year on whatever streaming service that you have. Other examples might be Sylvester Stallone in Copland, or Jennifer Aniston in Cake.

You can make your own The World Is To Dig artwork if you want, up to 40” wide. You can even get it on canvas if you want.