He should’ve been a cowboy. He should’ve learned to rope and ride. But he didn’t. Toby Keith learned as an alternative the right way to sing and to put in writing and to perform.
He was so good at it that when he sang “How Do You Like Me Now?!” (about how an old girlfriend who never thought he would make it gets to listen to him every morning on the radio), one couldn’t help but feel there is perhaps an actual story behind it. After many years of playing on country stations across the nation, Keith died this week of cancer. Lots might be said about his life and craft, but what strikes me is that he just might remind us of why we’d like the Psalms.
When people consider Toby Keith—especially those that don’t actually hearken to his form of music—they typically consider one song: “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” which went to the highest of the charts after the jihadist terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Keith sang:
Now this nation that I like has fallen under attack
A mighty sucker punch got here flyin’ in from somewhere within the back
Soon as we could see clearly through our big black eye
Man, we lit up your world just like the Fourth of July.
The song builds in defiance:
Hey, Uncle Sam, put your name at the highest of his list
And the Statue of Liberty began shakin’ her fist
And the eagle will fly, man, it’s gonna be hell
When you hear Mother Freedom start ringin’ her bell
And it appears like the entire wide world is raining down on you
Oh, dropped at you courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.
I used to be embarrassed by how much I loved that song. After all, though I used to be as hawkish as one could get on an American response to al-Qaeda (and I haven’t modified my mind on that in any respect), the song doesn’t fit easily—if in any respect—with a Christian vision of reality.
Even those of us who imagine within the just-war circumstances under which war is permissible recognize that war is all the time awful. Even in circumstances through which one believes that a state is justified to take a human life, nobody can or should rejoice in that.
But I’ll bet I played the song a thousand times, and I couldn’t help but sing it out loud, not less than after I was within the automotive by myself.
I noticed this when that song found itself once more on my personal playlist. I never stopped listening to Toby Keith, and his songs filled my playlist within the years following 9/11: “Old School,” “New Orleans,” “My List.” Even though I used to be the chief policy lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention, I couldn’t help but sing together with “I Love This Bar” (also alone in my automotive). When I left the SBC, I told friends, quoting Toby, “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”
But “The Angry American” didn’t make my list. Even so, I heard myself humming it—almost reflexively, and to the surprise of my conscious mind—on January 6, 2021, watching the US Capitol being attacked by a lawless mob. I noticed then that the song wasn’t really about foreign policy or counterterrorism. It was about anger.
By anger, I mean a particular kind—the sort that’s mixed with a way of powerlessness but in addition with a confidence that this remains to be the country that gave us Washington and Lincoln and Eisenhower, the country that would give the world words from We hold these truths to be self-evident to We don’t have anything to fear but fear itself to Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Uncle Sam—black eye or not—all the time gets up.
One of the things a recent Christian encounters in reading through the Bible for the primary time is how comforting and reassuring the Psalms will be. There’s a reason, the brand new Christian might think, that individuals want Psalm 23 recited to them on their deathbeds. There’s a reason, she might realize, that so a lot of these words are sung in celebrative praise and worship songs. But then that recent Christian might come upon other Psalms that never show up within the songs, songs that appear disturbingly indignant.
C. S. Lewis, I feel quite confident in saying, would have hated Toby Keith songs had he ever heard one. But he did know the Psalms, and in the midst of the last century he tried to clarify those indignant psalms of cursing enemies and calling down the judgment of God.
I don’t agree with all of Lewis’s thoughts on the Psalms, but there’s one thought specifically we’d like to contemplate at once.
Lewis gave the instance of some British soldiers he knew in World War II, all of whom had fallen for conspiracy theories that the federal government was making up the atrocities reported from Nazi Germany to “pep up” the troops. The conspiracy theories were bunk, after all, and the soldiers Lewis knew were dutifully serving their country—fighting on the fitting side of morality or justice. But they thought they were being lied to, they usually felt not the slightest little bit of anger.
“If that they had perceived, and felt as a person should feel, the diabolical wickedness which they believed our rulers to be committing, after which forgiven them, they’d have been saints,” Lewis wrote. “But to not perceive it in any respect—not even to be tempted to resentment—to just accept it as probably the most bizarre thing on this planet—argues a terrifying insensibility.”
Sometimes, Lewis wrote, we predict we are usually not tempted by something because we’re above the temptation once we are, in reality, below it. We don’t have to wrestle with our passions—to channel them within the direction God intends—because we’ve got no passions in any respect. We don’t feel the pull to wrath or lust or greed not for the explanations a sensible old desert monk might not feel them, but for the explanations a refrigerated corpse in a hospital morgue wouldn’t feel them.
The Psalms are usually not merely reassurance or celebration (though many Psalms are that). They also include the total range of human emotions—not only displaying them and putting them within the context of redemptive history but in addition calling the expression of a right type of them from us. “Deep calls to deep,” the Psalms say (42:7), and the depths of the Word of God just do that to us.
Jesus commands us to like our enemies, to bless those that persecute us (Matt. 5:44). He doesn’t do that the way in which a Zen Buddhist might—with a word that our “enemies” are only an illusion or that our anger ought to be replaced with passionless tranquility. Instead, the Bible calls out the sense of injustice and wrongness that we perceive and feel, and directs us as an alternative to the judgment of God as expressed on the Cross. “If possible, to this point because it is determined by you, live peaceably with all,” the apostle Paul wrote. “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it’s written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I’ll repay, says the Lord’” (Rom. 12:18–19).
The way of Jesus doesn’t dismiss anger but transfigures it by the way in which of the Cross. In conforming us to Christ, God shouldn’t be making us less human but more. We are hidden in a Lord who shouldn’t be un-angry or un-sad or un-happy but who’s indignant in the fitting way, sad in the fitting way, comfortable in the fitting way.
Could reading only the road My God, my God, why have you ever forsaken me? (Ps. 22:1) without the remainder of the psalm it starts, much less the remainder of the canon, result in an ungodly despair? Of course (the devil quotes Psalms, remember). But these are holy words, words of life, not simply because the Spirit sang them through David but because Jesus repeated them as he went—physically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally—through the valley of the shadow of death, for us.
Songs like “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” or Merle Haggard’s “The Fightin’ Side of Me” can evoke among the worst impulses. They will be jingoistic, vindictive, prideful—all that’s true. But the undeniable fact that we appear to need, every so often, songs like that may remind us of something.
We have higher songs—psalms of anger and of awe, of lament and of elation, of disappointment and of gratitude. We shouldn’t be embarrassed of them. We need them.
Most of the fashion we see throughout us isn’t really anger. It’s not alive enough to be anger. The adrenaline jolt of hating any person may give somewhat jolt to the limbic system, however it’s as distant from real anger as pornography addiction is from intimacy. When you step into a distinct world—the one you enter through the Psalms, all of them—you is perhaps surprised by anger. But it’s real, and it’s not the last word. That other form of rage? That ain’t price missing.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
