I’m not making any eternal pronouncements, but I will hazard a temporal judgment or two about a shift in thinking that occurred within a Harding group long ago. Obviously, this has stuck with me.
One year, “Holy Radiant Light” was the theme of the Regina social club (read: low-key sorority on a Christian college campus) banquet.
A year or two later, the theme was “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
And I said to myself, “Well, that’s a shift.” Actually, at the time, I was far more whipper-snappery, so I would have been more overtly disgusted and vocally critical.
Aleksandr Grechaninov’s choral masterwork Holy Radiant Light, from which the former club banquet took its theme, is a beautiful, artistic, worship-filled, choral masterwork. That piece exists on a far higher plane, and continues to be infinitely more valuable, than Cyndi Lauper’s pop nonsense “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”
To center a banquet at a Christian college on a worship text (that probably half of the group knew) was a tremendous idea. On the contrary, the women of the same social club should have been utterly embarrassed at even the question of whether to build its subsequent banquet around the song “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” The fact that they did, in fact, have an event with that theme, showed their interest in the trivial, and borderline immoral, over their interest in the deep things of God. That decision pointed up a marked decline in standards and depth, at least for a short period of time.
Earnestly Speaking 