The Living God Tabernacle

“Looking at uncensored programs; listening to Hollywood’s dirty jokes; listening  to old boogie- woogie music of the devil that’s hatched for men that’s of ill fame and vile conscience-the devil’s instruments- to inspire the works of the devil”.²⁴

   The American teenagers’ love affair with Elvis Presley was on uncontrollable and unstoppable. Most parents shuddered at the hip-grinding rebel who boldly inquired of their swooning daughters, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”. But when the cherubic-faced choirboy turned to the adult and sang gospel favorites like “His Hand In Mine,” and “Peace In The Valley,” (selections from an album which still holds the record of the most weeks at the number-1 spot in the United Kingdom)²⁵ their perception of the “child corruptor” gradually began to change.

    Undoubtedly, it was the trappings of Christianity that legitimized Elvis to the American public. The renegade-turned-respectable King of Rock ‘n’ Roll was even able to reach pinnacle of social acceptability – a private meeting with the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, in the December of 1970.

Did you know…?
    The occult is rampant in the United States. It is estimated that at least 5,000 witches are said to practice in New York and 10,000 in Los Angeles.
    

There are nearly half as many witches in the U.S. as there are doctors or clergymen.

PETERS, WHY KNOCK ROCK, PG 113.


   “What happened? What happened is that we just got used to Elvis. The young people of the fifties grew up with him, and the older folks, after living with him for a while, decided that he wasn’t so bad after all. Very rich and very famous, Elvis became a folk hero.”²⁶

        The kind of success that Elvis enjoyed has a tendency to make a person appear to be worthy of such greatness, but Elvis had not changed. No matter how the spirit cloaked itself in gospel, the flesh remained pure rock ‘n’ roll. It is generally acknowledged that “rock ‘n’ roll” is a long-standing black euphemism for sex, and with Elvis, “it was the aggressive taunting, sexual performance combined with the music which drove fans to hysteria.”²⁷

     The religious Elvis was often quoted as saying, “God gave me a voice. If I turned against God I’d ruined.”

         And yet, as Gary Herman points out in Rock ‘n’ Roll Babylon, “He also recognized the Devil’s part in his success, saying that ‘my voice is ordinary; if I stand still while I’m singing, I’m a dead man’”²⁸

    Other rock ‘n’ roll performers took their cue from him. Pat Boone, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and a multitude more (many of them raised in Pentecostal churches) propagated the vulgarity that Elvis preached with the Judas-like deception born of religious delusion. And what it produced was a decade of spiritual schizophrenics, flip-flopping between the pulpit and the stage.

     For nearly a decade, rock ‘n’ roll and Jesus were being weighed on the scale of financial profit, and in 1964 the results were made known:  Jesus lost.

      In April of 1964, a double- edged musical blitzkrieg from Great Britain invaded our shores. American rock ‘n’ roll had been chewed, swallowed, and vomited back at as under a new name: Rock. It was like rock ‘n’ roll, but this new sound paid no lip service to anything resembling Western religious tradition.

Instead, it came drenched in drugs and Eastern mysticism, and the deceptive seduction of rock ‘n’ roll had to give way to the total, unconditional surrender which rock demanded.

          The first wave, and perhaps the most influential of these invaders, was the four cheeky mop-heads with Limey accents that called themselves The Beatles. And along with their sassy new sound, they brought a new look. Perversion came out of the closet and became fashionable as millions rush to adopt the long hired look of these musical messiahs- a look that appropriately expressed their cynical responds to all authority and tradition. Seemingly overnight, a mocking sort of nihilism became the trendy substitute for religion among the spoiled, confused, flower children the 60s had produced.

     The Beatles’ music offered gleefully shaking heads and infectious wit rather than sex as bait. On the surface, at least, it appeared to be clever and even humorous. Few adults were aware of the content of the music, and most teenagers perceived the Beatles’ message only at subliminal levels.²⁹ In retrospect, media experts agree that the main contribution that the Beatles made to Western society laid not so much in their music for music’s sake, but in music for the sake of the message it carried. And what was the message? Psychedelic drugs.

   The Beatles certainly didn’t invent marijuana. Its used could be traced back to the shamanistic rituals of the American Indians and the whirling dervishes of ninth-century Persia. What they did was to culturally legitimize its use for the general population of the world. Marijuana expanded the limits of both the imagination and sensory perception, challenging the user to re-create the sounds and visions that “spun and fizzed and cascaded through the frontal lobes of their brain.”³⁰  LSD went even further; it eliminated all barriers between real and unreal, it was  “the ground zero of chemically induced revelation.”³¹ Spirituality was a trip, and LSD was the sacrament of the new faith.

   John Lennon famously said in 1966, “Christianity will go. It was vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that, I’m right and will be proved right. We [The Beatles] are more popular than Jesus Christ right now. I don’t know which will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity,”³²

   The second wave of the British invasion washed ashore in 1966, and when the tide receded, gone were music’s days of veiled sexual innuendo and carefully phrased allegories. The rock generation had arrived, and it was “time to tell it like it is

Did You know…?
Even deaf mutes respond to musical sounds and can distinguish several musical instruments by the nature of their vibrations

Shrill sounds in sufficient volume can congeal proteins in a liquid media. When an egg is placed in front of a speaker at some of the louder rock concerts, it becomes a hard-boiled snack!

-let it all hang out.” Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones did just that, and in the process he created a role model for rock stars that would endure for many years to come.

      A performance by the Rolling Stones has always been a macabre mixture of sexual debauchery, sadistic violence, Satanism and drugs. Most revealing is the fact that the violence that has become an intrinsic part of every concert is no accident, but a natural result of the music and the way it is played.

     In his book The Music of Man, noted musician and historian, Yehudi Menuhin describes a Stones concert as follows: “I heard what sounded to me like a premonition of hell… Of notes, pitches, musical design, I could distinguish little… Under such overpowering circumstances, I understood how deliberately the whole madness is engineered. It aims to numb all awareness, to leave no choice but to surrender and participate…  The Rolling Stones are trying desperately to generate and liberate, but as they know little of those disciplines and structures through which emotions are transformed into art, they can only generate hysteria. Their music is more like the elimination of structure, dissolving everything back to crude clay.”³³

      Eager to give credit where credit was due, in December of 1968 the Stones released a song titled “Sympathy For The  Devil” – a descent into the feverish world of voodoo devils, hallucinogenic images, and pounding rhythms. It was not music. It was cacophony- a screaming banshee bent on inciting death and destruction. During one memorable   performance, as lead singer, Mick Jagger, pranced on stage in his Lucifer-in-the-flesh persona, suddenly the drug-crazed mob erupted into a killing rage. Within minutes, five people were dead, including  one man that had been stabbed and beaten  with chains while Jagger watched from the stage, just a few feet away. It was as if “…the Rolling Stones had OD’d (overdosed) on a massive dose of their own medicine.”³⁴

     Satan had boldly shown his face and made his demands, and, like lemmings, the rock performers complied. They were victims of their own greedy lifestyle. Spurred on by a lust for more fame, power, and wealth, they openly declared their allegiance to the Devil in the music they performed. And where they led, young people followed. Innocent, curious, naive teenagers stopped to listen, and Lucifer did the rest.³⁵

    In 1971, musicologist Frank Garlock, a professor at Bob Jone’s University, wrote: “ All one needs to do is to make a trip to the place where rock ‘n roll has its roots (Africa, South America, and India) and observe the ceremonies which often go along with this kind of music –voodoo rituals, sex orgies, human sacrifice, and devil worship- to know the direction in which we as a nation are headed.”³⁶

         How right he was! By the mid 70s, the music charts made it perfectly clear that, in America, Satanism was selling very well indeed

Did You Know…?
    According to a recent a University of Minnesota study, listening to music is the primary way troubled teens say they cope with problems.

  A poll 2,000 students in grades 7 through 12 showed that 68% of them regarded entertainers, such as rock musicians, as heroes.
                                                    The Christian Herald, May 1987