** Hi. I am making an editorial decision and saying lyrics count as literature. I know, I know. I’m also calling ethics theology, which is only sometimes true. Bear with me. **

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And my hands are open, reaching out / I’m learning how to live with doubt / I’m learning how to lean into the grey / ‘Cause I’ve had enough of black and white / I’ll find another way and I will lean into the grey

— “The Grey,” new song by Thrice, 2018

When I was 17 years old, I studied Thrice’s lyrics like a good AP English student, searching for allusions I could recognize from the Bible or from C.S. Lewis. What I found between the references to my own Christian spirituality, was a spirit of social justice—of anti-militarism, of a refusal to worship the American God.

Maybe all of this exists in punk and alt rock lyrics; I don’t know. At the time I was too inundated in the world of Christian rock music to know much of what those on the outside sang about. I loved searching for the echoes of Christianity in lead Dustin Kensrue’s lyrics.

But Thrice wasn’t a “Christian band.” Is this what intrigued me? This was a band that low-key alluded to The Chronicles of Narnia, sang about prodigal sons and storing your treasures in heaven. And yet, they were not playing Christian venues. Their lyrics were not saccharine like contemporary worship music. They made no space in their shows for altar calls. They just made hella good rock music.

At 17 I was on the cusp of so much change. I had really only been a part of the evangelical world for a few years. But I was in it. I was “sold out,” convinced of the black-and-white gospel my pastors were presenting and the ethical system they had put in place. And yet, around age 17, 18, I started asking questions. I started wondering why the elders at my church were so wrapped up in Republican politics. I thought that maybe abortion was OK in certain contexts. And though it would be a little later before I could wrap my mind around the concept of a gay Christian, I was already beginning to wonder why gay men and women couldn’t get married.

For this reason, Thrice was the band I needed at 17 years old. Unknowingly, Thrice was helping me form an ethic that was constantly asking questions of systems and structures, of heeding to the black-and-white.

*

First I became a pacifist.

This was thanks, in part, to Dustin and the lyrics of songs like “Don’t Tell and We Won’t Ask”:

And if it comes to murder
Don't tell and we won't ask you how
You sleep at night when the lights go out
And you're all alone
With all the ghosts of lesser humans
Whose lives you've spilt to suit your own

My senior year of high school, I wrote a piece for the student newspaper about a resurgence of anti-war songs that imitated the anti-Vietnam songs of the late ‘60s. My dad pulled out his catalogue of music and helped me find those emblematic tunes he grew up with, which seemed so much like the songs I loved too. I knew my article was forcing it a bit, because my sample size was small. Even though Thrice was singing against war did not mean many other bands were. I published my article anyway.

That was the year I started reading about child soldiers and kids without shoes. Then I went on a church mission trip where, instead of spending all two weeks doing Hurricane Katrina relief, we led VBS for the richest church in Louisiana. I had questions. I felt the contradictions of the brand of faith I had “sold” myself to.

I didn’t want out, though. I had no imagination for a true Christianity apart from the evangelical world I knew.

So I stayed and found music that helped me express my angst.

*

Thrice took a hiatus a few years ago, when Dustin pastored at the infamous, and now defunct, Mars Hill Church and released worship music through the Mars Hill label. Dustin was one of the many network pastors that resigned when Mark Driscoll’s tyranny came into full view. A year after his resignation and the fall of Mars Hill, Dustin was back with Thrice, releasing a new album: To Be Everywhere is to Be Nowhere.

A part of me wanted to know if Thrice’s ethic–specifically Dustin’s ethic–still aligned with my own. Did their music still challenge me in the way I needed it to as a teenager? I wondered, did Dustin’s stint with Mars Hill change him?

So, the other night, like I was 17 again, I spent hours listening to and scouring the lyrics to Thrice’s newer songs for hints of conversion. I found what I had hoped for. Just as my understanding of God, myself, and the world has evolved, just as my ethic has both matured and grown more complex in the 11 years I’ve loved Thrice–the band has grown and matured as well. In some ways, this is so painfully obvious. Like, duh. Of course they have grown. It’s been over a decade. But in other ways, it’s a blessing, because it cannot be said of some writers I loved as a teen or young adult.

The song that I jam to now is “Blood on the Sand,” a song unambiguously about violence against people of color and our complicity, especially as white US Americans, in that violence:

There's blood on the sand, there's blood in the street
And there's a gun in my hand, or there might as well be
And I'm sick of it — I’m so sick of this

One thing I am convinced of in my work in Christian social ethics is that those who are privileged (white, cishet, etc.) have a responsibility to use that privilege for the good. Edward Said wrote about being a representative for “the poor, the disadvantaged, the voiceless, the underrepresented, the powerless” (Said, Representations of the Intellectual). I have a social responsibility as a white scholar to make room for the voices of people of color in my work (citing, but not colonizing), and speaking against injustice that may not affect me directly because of my privilege.

That’s what I think about when I hear this song, the deep groans of four men and their instruments, “so sick of this” on behalf of others.

I look forward to hearing the rest of their upcoming album Palms. It drops on September 14, 2018.