Worship is the beating heart of congregational life, the place of shared experience that engages, sends forth, and re-engages. It's an experience that is at its best incarnate, but that can be shared through media if distance or plague so demands. As generally speaking the goal of my little church is not to send our worshippers to meet Jesus face-to-face before their time, that meant COVID forced our hand. We had to livestream, and had to scale up to meet that need.
Our choice, for its ubiquity, was Facebook. As we reasoned it back in 2020, Facebooks' depth of engagement and relative ease of use made it an good medium for streaming. It allowed the sharing of invitation across our personal networks, which meant it was open to those who might wish to visit, and wasn't delimited to invited members.
It's worked for that purpose, more or less, but lately it's become...well...worse.
Our worship is traditional, meaning the hymns we sing are...more often than not...reflective of this pastor's strong preference for sturdy old Gospel standards.
They're meatier theologically than most Christian contemporary music, but they also rise to meet the vocal capacities of a little church. They're lovely and totally singable if you can sing, which my fellowship can. And if you can't, there's something about old gospel standards that brings beauty and grace to the heartfelt caterwaulings of even the most vocally challenged faithful.
Almost every week, we're hit with copyright claims, as Facebook's avaricious algorithms flag the hymns we sing as violations of copyright.
The latest ding was for singing a beautiful mid-nineteenth-century standard, Abide with Me. "This is our music," said a subsentient fragment of code slaved to Warner/Chappell Music USA. "It belongs to us. We demand our cut of ad revenues from this video."
To which I say, advisedly and with purpose, the hell it is.
The music dates from 1861, so far out of copyright that it's utterly preposterous to even suggest ownership. It's sacred music for a sacred purpose, one that goes deep back down into the evangelical tradition, back to the time of the founding of my humble historic church. We're singing it from a hymnal, copies of which were purchased for use in public worship.
Our "ad revenue" is, of course, zero, as corporate sponsorship of worship isn't something we do. These claims don't impact our worship...not yet. But the needling annoyance of these mammonist machines seems a marker of a shift in our culture, as the crass profit-maximization of our increasingly false and decadent society stakes its claim.
Does this impact our religious freedom? No. Not really.
Facebook is not a public space. It is an owned space, a place of radical venality, where we and our relationships are bought and sold like chattel, and where even our most sacred time is commodified.
Let me suggest, Mark, that reminding us of this on the regular is remarkably foolish.
Posts
