# The Sacred Power of an Off-Key Beatles Song

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/heretic-hereafter-podcast-7475240/the-sacred-power-of-an-off-key-beatles-song
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/heretic-hereafter-podcast-7475240/the-sacred-power-of-an-off-key-beatles-song.md
Podcast: [Heretic Hereafter Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/heretic-hereafter-podcast-7475240)
Published: 2026-04-29T11:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://heretichereafter.substack.com/p/the-sacred-power-of-an-off-key-beatles
Audio file: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/195647714/bf7945b584dee94e7321669d6e30842c.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/heretic-hereafter-podcast-7475240/episodes/the-sacred-power-of-an-off-key-beatles-song
Duration seconds: 235

## Resource

“There are no unsacred places. There are only sacred places and desecrated places.” -Wendell Berry A few years ago, I was hanging out with a friend who’s an Episcopal priest, when the topic of wedding music came up. I told her that I’d walked down the aisle to The Beatles’ “And I Love Her,” played by my brother, Karl, on acoustic guitar. My friend explained that, in the Episcopal church, “only sacred music is allowed,” so no Beatles for weddings. I wondered if she was right. Ought I have marched down the aisle to Bach or Vivaldi? Indeed, the switch from organ prelude to my brother’s acoustic and his off-key singing was a bit jarring! Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Still, her response rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was because I’d ingested enough bad Christian art (Christian contemporary music, Kirk Cameron movies, THOMAS KINCADE ) to last me a lifetime. The problem with this sort of Christian “art” is that the artists feel the need to clobber the viewers over the head with The Message. There’s no nuance, no subtlety, and certainly nothing that could offend the delicate sensibilities of the largely Evangelical audience. (You’ll never hear someone swear in a Christian movie, for instance.) Thomas Kincade aside, this division between sacred and nonsacred art offends me as an artist. The point of art (be it visual art, film, literature, music or the humble Substack) is to reveal capital-T Truth. In my opinion, the primary measure of artistic success is how effectively Truth is revealed, if at all. The idea that art has to be explicitly about God or Jesus for it to be sacred strikes me as absurd. Why should the church (or anyone, really) gatekeep what others find…

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