Like a Prayer: Two Songs about Religion and Sex

Pedro The Lion, “Rapture”

Sufjan Stevens, “Casimir Pulaski Day”

“Rapture,” from 2002’s Control, was the first Pedro the Lion song I ever heard and remains my favorite, but it was only a year or two ago—when I put it on a mix CD for a friend—that I actually started listening to the lyrics, whose bluntness took me quite by surprise.

The revelation that I had been appreciating the song for years while completely oblivious to the hot and heavy adultery tale that is its central focus speaks, of course, to the potency of the music. The opening bars pound and grind with speaker-rattling presence: harsh, percussive guitars, an inside-out drumbeat, and a bassline that heaves and totters between notes. When the verse kicks in, it’s underlaid by thick, unrelenting synth that completely fills up the remaining space in the mix; the full-to-the-brim sound of it all makes it difficult to focus on anything else while the song is in your headphones.

Beyond that, of course, there are the lyrics, which paint a classic and thoroughly unsympathetic scene of two people in a hotel room, at least one of them married (see the caustic opening couplet, “This is how we multiply / Pity that it’s not my wife”), doing something they clearly know they shouldn’t. The phrasing is spare and to the point; songwriter David Bazan bears a Stephin Merritt-worthy knack for presenting heavy topics in as few words as possible. Quick turns of phrase like “The sheets and the sweat / The seed and the spill” are appropriately brusque, not affording the encounter any more romantic suggestion than it deserves, and the story is short on subplot (and even plot, really).

The thunderous music and refreshingly unsentimental narrative are a powerful combination, but what really transforms “Rapture” from a good song into a great one is the looming presence of a third character. An observant Christian, Bazan has always been known for weaving religious themes into his work, albeit in subversive ways, and as the two adulterers do their sordid business, it appears that God is in the room with them. It’s hinted at in witty throwaway lines like “Gideon is in the drawer / Clothes scattered on the floor,” then hammered home in the grandiose coda, “Oh, my sweet rapture / I hear Jesus and the angels singing ‘Hallelujah!’ / Calling me to enter the promised land.” Whether the heavenly choir is beckoning the him away from his lustful pursuits or urging him onward is left to us to decide.

In the same ambivalent vein, that word, rapture, is of immense importance here, being one of very few words that can connote sexual and religious gratification simultaneously. The physical and the spiritual are yoked together, at once elevating the one and debasing the other. And of all the dark and sticky sins to choose from, there’s none better to support an image of biblical apocalypse than adultery—after all, isn’t that what most of us would do if we knew this was our last day on earth?

David Bazan is the rare kind of Christian rock artist who doesn’t alienate secular listeners or make liberal indie kids gag, in large part because of his willingness to tackle the dark stuff—to understand and appreciate that the uglier sides of humanity are a part of life, and thus deserve to be a part of art. Somewhere in the back of our minds, we all know what we would do, what impulse we would fulfill, if we knew the world were going to end today. The fornicators in “Rapture” have just given in to that impulse early.

Revisiting Pedro the Lion got me thinking about another conspicuously Christian songwriter, particularly about a song of his that also conflates religion and sex provocatively (if not quite so cynically). “Casimir Pulaski Day” was widely hailed as one of the standout tracks from Sufjan Stevens‘ 2005 Illinoise album, despite being perhaps the least sonically ambitious. It has nothing approaching the spooky dark romance of “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.,” the inspiring enthusiasm of “Chicago,” the hypnotic groove of “They Are Night Zombies!” or the epic orchestration of three-part overture “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!” Instead it delivers, in terms modest and plaintive, the story of a teen love’s death from cancer, and the overwhelming flood of frustration and doubt it creates.

Musically, “Pulaski” could not be more unlike “Rapture.” The arrangement, especially given what the rest of Illinois sounds like, is spare, sticking mostly to guitar, banjo, and occasional female voice. The busiest it gets is on the chorus, where the hum of what is either organ or woodwinds (it’s mixed too low to tell) creates a soft bed for the melody to lay in, and on the instrumental breaks, where a distant-sounding trumpet plays a mournful pattern of two- and three-note phrases, keeping things solemn out of respect for the (soon to be) deceased.

Likewise, the lyrical style is contrary to Bazan’s in its intimacy, describing in affecting detail the meaningful objects (”Goldenrod and the 4-H stone / The things I brought you when I found out you had cancer of the bone”) and tender moments (”In the morning, through the window shade / When the light pressed up against your shoulder blade”) that befit two people brought together by actual affection and emotion, rather than just seething, desperate desire. Memories from the narrator’s youthful courtship with his beloved blend seamlessly with the moving present, a diary of her worsening state and the ever more obvious inability of anyone to do anything about it.

It’s in these time jumps that religion and sex arise, serving to distinguish these two periods in the characters’ lives, as in this pair of stanzas:

Tuesday night at the bible study
We lift our hands and pray over your body
But nothing ever happens

And I remember at Michael’s house
In the living room when you kissed my neck
And I almost touched your blouse

There’s a clear tension between the way the present Sufjan views this woman—and, more to the point, her body—and the way his younger self did. Past Sufjan saw her through the lens of fluttery adolescent fancy, in the full bloom of her teenage years, and his gaze was an eager, sensuous one, the kind that makes mental catalogues of body parts and articles of clothing. Present Sufjan sees her through the much more sobering lens of mortality, as her earthly body wastes away, and these passages are noticeably lacking in any physical description of her—the one possible exception being the wrenching moment in the last chorus immediately after she has died, when for just a second, he thinks he sees her breathing. Apart from that brief instant of hope, the sight of her now cannot conjure anything but despair.

Adult Sufjan deals with this very adult situation by appealing to his faith—praying that things will change for the better and referring over and over to “all the glory that the lord has made” as a kind of reassuring constant. But as the song progresses, that seems a less and less comforting mantra, and an unspoken nostalgia surfaces for those younger days, when his idea of comfort was more primal and instinctive, less abstract and remote. Not all of those old memories are pleasant; one verse recalls the day the girl’s father discovered the young lovers had had sex, and their panic as they wondered what he might do in response. But that shame is as nothing compared to the impotence he feels in watching her die, unable to comprehend or rationalize the situation or do anything but sit and weep. And the failure of faith to provide any help in this regard manages, in the end, to instill the faithful with a kernel of doubt. By the time we reach the final line, the perennial Christian doctrine of “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” has been twisted in the narrator’s mind into one that seems to fit the situation better: “He takes and He takes and He takes.”