Leading UK Composer Rocks Music Establishment: Embracing Christianity is "One of the most radical and counter-cultural moves a musician can make"
A smug ignorance, a gross oversimplification and caricature that serves as an analytical understanding of religion, is the common intellectual currency. The bridge has to be built by Christians and others being firm in resisting increasingly aggressive attempts to still their voices."
(United Kingdom)—James MacMillan, one of the conductors of the BBC Philharmonic orchestra and a leading British composer, rocked the establishment this week when he lambasted atheistic media, art and government elites for trying to drive religion out of public life and culture. In so doing, he contends, they risk making society bland and uniform.
Noting that surveys have shown only one in five people who work in TV consider themselves as religious—compared with seven out of 10 among the general public—in a Telegraph report, MacMillan was quoted as saying that embracing spirituality is now one of the most radical and counter-cultural moves a musician can make.
Referencing the above statistics, he added, "These are people who speak only to themselves and have convinced each other that the rest of the country thinks just like them. They are wrong. (Italics mine.) The campaigning atheists, as opposed to the live-and-let-live variety, are raising their voices because they recognise that they are losing; the project to establish a narrow secular orthodoxy is failing. A smug ignorance, a gross oversimplification and caricature that serves as an analytical understanding of religion, is the common intellectual currency. The bridge has to be built by Christians and others being firm in resisting increasingly aggressive attempts to still their voices."
"I believe," he concluded, that "it is God's divine spark which kindles the musical imagination now, as it has always done, and reminds us, in an increasingly dehumanised world, of what it means to be human."
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