Conservative Christians are often tempted at the onset of the Christmas season to see the celebrations as a resurgence of true religion in the public square. But Christmas celebrations today are more a commemoration of the death of Christendom than an expression of its acceptance. It is not insignificant that most of our Christmas music is noticeably old, and that even new releases attempt to sound old. Nostalgia is a form of mourning.

Indeed, there is no shortage of commentary about our ongoing civilizational decline. For most of the past century, the best and brightest writers of every political and philosophical persuasion have been unanimous about little else but the unmistakable smell of rot in our culture.

Polling shows the general public can smell it too, with sky-high rates of loneliness, declining mental health, and huge and growing number of Americans attesting to an inarticulate belief that America is “heading in the wrong direction.” 

The growing malaise is no abstraction: 2022 produced the most suicides in our nation’s history, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

A culture is characterized by its public rites. Western culture today shows itself most clearly in popular song. 

The biggest musical “hits” of the past century are forthright expressions of a culture that is lost and adrift, uprooted and at best vaguely aspirational in its beliefs. And far from confidently pressing ahead and rejecting the wisdom of the ages, you can hear in our popular music an overt expression of longing for parental love, for genuine authority, and for familial and Christian traditions.

“When all the world is a hopeless jumble / And the raindrops tumble all around / Heaven opens a magic lane,” go the melancholy lyrics of “Over the Rainbow” (1939). “There’s a place that I heard of once in a lullaby,” the singer recalls. “Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly. / Birds fly over the rainbow; why, then, oh why can’t I?” 

“And in the streets, the children screamed / The lovers cried and the poets dreamed / But not a word was spoken / The church bells all were broken,” wrote Don McLean in “American Pie” (1971):

And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died

Even lyricists whom conservatives decried as progressive and iconoclastic, in fact, were more regretful of the state of the postmodern world than assertive of any coherent new worldview.

For example, in “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975), the singer addresses his sainted mother. Without articulating any truth, he admits to knowing he has not lived by whatever the truth is. “Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth,” he sings, adding desperately “I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all” and “Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me.” 

In an ultimate reckoning somewhere beyond the catastrophic and confusing world of postmodern culture, the singer believes he must face a reality in which his choices are reprehensible. But for now, “nothing really matters to me,” he cries—giving a hint as to why he so dreads “facing the truth.”

John Lennon’s “Imagine” (1971) is arguably the closest thing to a popular assertion of a new political-philosophical order. But even that anthem only exhorts people to live “for today” with no thought to posterity. The song also annihilates all the high-stakes realities that inspire and motivate the moral imagination (“Imagine there’s no countries,” “no heaven,” and “no hell below us”) and provides in their place only the cold abstraction of “the world,” which “someday” will “live as one.” And “Imagine” ultimately admits to being a rambling series of thoughts from a “dreamer” to whom, as with the central figure in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” nothing in our real, day-to-day world really matters.

The list goes on.

Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson” (1968) laments that “every way you look at” candidates for election “you lose,” and that even the unifying celebrity Joe DiMaggio, to whom “our nation turns its lonely eyes,” has “left and gone away.” 

The immensely popular soundtrack to West Side Story (1961) is unmistakably about orphanhood, social breakdown, and death—and about longing for a “place for us” as elusive as “somewhere over the rainbow” or “the world” of Lennon’s “dreamer.”

In the 21^st century, the massive hit “Hey Ya” by OutKast (a morose song buried in frenetic fun) laments:

If what they say is, “Nothing is forever”
… Then what makes, what makes, what makes love the exception?
So why oh, why oh, why oh, why oh, why oh
Are we so in denial when we know we’re not happy here?
Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance

In the most-played song of the current century, “Chasing Cars” by the Scottish band Snow Patrol, our culture is reduced to a boyish voice despairing into a lover’s arms. “I need your grace,” he pleads. “Would you lie with me and just forget the world?”

In response to this growing malaise, I and other singer/songwriters like me are trying to push back against it. My new single “Father Aeneas Bails You Out” is one such effort. It is a Christmas song about a Roman Catholic priest ministering to lost souls in the middle of World War III.

Set in a dystopian near-future, sometime after a nuclear exchange has wiped out our coastal centers of cultural and political power, the song’s setting evokes the desperation many people are feeling today.

Rather than just confronting the culture, however, the song sympathizes with those of us stuck in it and takes that as our shared starting point. The song invites us along rather than asserts itself, and it offers a fatherly concern for us in place of the sibling rivalry that comes from mere criticism.

Father Aeneas does not forget the world. His love is as personal as that of the singer in “Chasing Cars”—indeed, it is more personal because he has a place for us. And it is a real place in this world, not somewhere over the rainbow. What’s more, Father Aeneas will sacrifice all he has to get you there.

I modeled the title character of “Father Aeneas Bails You Out” on the classical figure of the Aeneid, often depicted carrying his father and his household gods (his heritage and his culture), accompanying his son (his posterity), and walking determinedly out of Troy as it burns—destined to found Roman civilization.

Like his namesake, Father Aeneas takes the moment when his world is up in flames as the beginning of his story. But as he walks through the flames of our Troy, he carries with him more than his predecessor ever had—not only all that is needed for a people to continue, to cohere, and to flourish, but also what is needed for you, individually, to find the solace and fulfillment our desolate culture cries out for in song year after year.

Father Aeneas carries the sacraments and precepts of the Church and—as important to him as Aeneas’ own son was to the Father of Rome—you. This Christmas season, may we all find peace and comfort in these truths and look forward to a new year devoted to them.