Pink Floyd, Spiritual Warfare, & the Problem of Christian Music

Whether you’ve been following Jesus for years or if you’re a new believer, you’ve likely wrestled with the concept of “mixture.” By mixture I mean the interplay between worldly versus Godly interests—holy versus unholy, pure versus obscene—in entertainment and the arts. Unfortunately, this necessary caution against mixture tends to water down the coolest thing God’s people were called to do: create. This has spawned generations of lackluster literature, films, and especially music.

Humans were designed to love music. There is a reason why the Scriptures are full of it, and why it moves us, sometimes to tears. And not merely worship music, but everything from classical to rap, bluegrass to rock, tribal to orchestral holds this sway.

God calls us to create music, but as with everything God creates, the enemy tries to distort it. As we learn more about the supernatural battle raging in the unseen realm, the spirit of Religion steps in to tout legalism. Woke Christianity promotes laxity. And we the body of Christ are left trying reconcile these competing beliefs.

The past couple of decades have seen an erosion of innovation when it comes to music. A recent Substack article by Ryan Peter, The Day When the (Christian) Music Died, explores this in depth, and it’s worth the read (don’t be dissuaded by the Stryper thumbnail). His conclusion is that people (especially young people) are increasingly longing for creative, technically impressive, music. And they want to enjoy it live, and not merely at church on Sunday morning.

The Wall: Part 1

I’ve always listened to every kind of music. I love Bach and Ennio Morricone, but pre-Jesus, my hands-down favorite was Pink Floyd. My friend Marie was the Rush girl at our high school and I was the Floyd guy. We owned all the albums, went to the ‘92 and ‘94 tour concerts, and knew all of the albums and lyrics by heart.

Post-Jesus, I sold most of my Pink Floyd CDs and LPs at garage sales, keeping just a few of my favorites in digital format. It wasn’t really a matter of mixture and eliminating the secular music; I just didn’t listen to classic rock much anymore. There were lots of innovative Christian bands to enjoy and they were dominating my radio.

I still have a cassette of The Wall somewhere in my shed, and I really wish I still had all the LPs, especially the original The Piper at the Gates of Dawn (which had a super-cool interior). I even had an original, unopened, vinyl of The Dark Side of the Moon, which now goes for about $900 on Ebay.

Today in our house you might hear anything—modern worship music, classical, country, jazz, or soul (I adore Otis Redding) with the occasional irreverent Johnny Cash or Kid Rock song thrown in.

But mixture matters, and we’ve been learning to tune our ears toward the declarations made in the words spoken in our home, even in songs we once never thought much about. We’ve deleted a few tracks here and there by once favorite artists that no longer sit well with our Spirit; it’s a journey of holiness and He reveals things individually that need to go, for one reason or another.

But that wasn’t the issue with Pink Floyd, not yet.

Up till two weeks ago I hadn’t really listened to Pink Floyd in years. And their penultimate¹ album, The Wall, I hadn’t heard in decades. Then one night a few weeks ago, YouTube suggested to me a channel I hadn’t seen before: Isaac Brown, a Gen Z music producer who recently started doing classic rock “reaction videos.”

If you’re not familiar with the term, reaction videos are where a young adult (sometimes an industry professional) previews a classic movie or listens to a nostalgic piece of music for the first time while giving their impression on it. The vast majority of these reaction videos are pointless and lame—why would I want to watch somebody watch something (or listen to something) I’ve already seen? Good point, but some are good, and it’s kinda the same as watching a favorite movie with a friend, hoping they’ll love it as much as you do.

Or, as is the case with Isaac Brown, they point out fascinating aspects of the recording industry and music composition one might never have considered before. It’s like a history and science lesson for music nerds, using the albums we grew up loving.

When I saw he was listening to Pink Floyd’s The Wall for the first time, I was all in, but I also wondered if there might be a mixture problem to consider. I decided to listen and trust the Holy Spirit to clarify matters.

The Wall: Part II

Born in 1976, I grew up with Pink Floyd as background music but I didn’t become a fan until my teenage years. It wasn’t till then that I began to understand The Wall a little more. For those who don’t know, it’s a concept album, meaning that all of the songs taken together tell a multi-chapter story. In this case, the story of a man² wounded by multiple childhood traumas leading him to construct a metaphoric wall of self-isolation.

As I listened to it again with an ear toward spiritual warfare, I had two immediate observations: 1) Roger Waters had tapped into some transcendent truths that he probably never realized while writing them, and 2) modern music rarely has the kind of intensity that this stuff has.

As music producer Isaac Brown observed with Pink Floyd (and to a lesser degree, The Eagles, Queen, and Fleetwood Mac), “Nobody is making this kind of music anymore.”

With the exception of the occasional David Crowder or Toby Mac track, I was hard-pressed to think of many songs—much less an entire album—that rocked as vehemently as this 1979 classic. I listened to most of it, but turned it off to get some sleep since it was already pretty late.

The mixture question was still undetermined, but I was too tired to ponder it at 1:00 am.

The Devil’s Works?

The very next morning I was previewing Brown’s reaction video to The Dark Side of the Moon on my headphones while doing my morning routine—making coffee and getting the kids’ breakfast. Suddenly my email inbox received a Substack article by James Dellingpole: Why You Can No Longer Listen to The Dark Side of the Moon: How Pop Music – ALL Pop Music, Even Music By Your Favourite Artistes – Is The Devil’s Work.

I was at that moment listening to The Dark Side of the Moon.

Huh? I thought. What’s that about, God?

Dellingpole has since placed the article behind a paywall, but the abstract is this: The music industry from the mid-‘60s onward has been complicit in psy-ops influencing a cultural acceptance of government lordship. He specifically (over) focuses on the lyric from The Dark Side of the Moon song Breathe, which states, “Desperation is the English way.”

While Dellingpole’s knowledge and arguments regarding Satanic imagery and ritualistic abuse surrounding the music industry³ are noteworthy, I believe he was a little off base going full Church Lady on The Dark Side of the Moon. Houses of the Holy by Led Zeppelin? Yeah, sure, but maybe not uproot every crop while pulling the weeds.

But hasn’t this been the case when it comes to mixture and the church since the inception of rock and roll?

From Elvis to Cardi B, we’ve wrestled with the spiritual implications of creative innovation versus overt debauchery in the entertainment world. It’s all the more frustrating because when it comes to Christian music today, instead of forging new paths, what we’re often given are formulaic, boring compositions.

I asked a young friend about it the other day, and he had this to say:

“Well, let me tell ya! I have to listen to current Christian music on the radio 40 hours a week and it’s so incredibly mundane it drives me crazy.”

This is what the labels are buying and promoting instead of music that gets you out of your seat — or the kind of sounds that just a few decades ago, secular audiences were willing to spend a Friday night and a paycheck to see live.

I’m not talking about replacing the Holy Spirit with smoke machines here. I’m talking about unleashing God-fearing musicians with license to experiment, using new ways to express their talent. We’re excited about revival, but we need a music revival by God’s people, as well.

As the old saying goes: Every Stratocaster wants a David Gilmour for Christmas. (If this doesn’t make sense to you — my wife gave me great grief about it — think of it this way: Every trumpet wants a Louis Armstrong.)

Can you imagine what a modern David Gilmour (or Eddie Van Halen) who loves Jesus could do with a Stratocaster and the license to wield it? What if the Church facilitated venues for young and old to gather corporately outside of church to enjoy it? Most people don’t know it, but one song that infused the Gospel message into the mainstream ether was Lenny Kravitz’s Are You Gonna Go My Way:

I was born long ago
I am the chosen, I’m the one
I have come to save the day
And I won’t leave until I’m done

While not a Christian song (or video) per se, Kravitz was inspired by his mother’s Christian faith:

“The words are meant to sound as if Jesus Christ is speaking them…So basically, ‘Are you gonna go my way?’ meaning ‘my way of love…I had no idea that that song would become what it became. No idea. There was nothing on the radio like that and the recording is so raw, it’s ridiculous.”

Like Roger Waters, Kravitz had stumbled onto spiritual truths within groundbreaking music ventures, and the people (both secular and Jesus-loving) embraced it.

I’ve heard many Christian pastors lately saying they’re seeing revival of the likes they haven’t seen since the Jesus Movement of the 1970s. It’s worth considering that that era produced some of the best, most creative rock music in history, including music and themes inspired by radical transformations through Jesus.

I recall ministering to a disillusioned guy in the early 2000s who sort of knew Jesus, but was pretty disgusted with tame churchianity; his favorite band at the time was Insane Clown Posse (ICP). We got to talking music, and I gave him a CD starting with David Crowder Band’s live version of I Need Words/God of Wrath from The Lime CD, hoping it would blow some of his Lutheran paradigms out of the water.

He came to me the next day.

“Dude, that Crowder guy?” he said with wide eyes. “Rock on.”

He immediately ripped every David Crowder Band album (sorry DCB, he was a work in progress).

Of course the opposite is also true. The devil is always at work but even secular music, both in the ‘70s and now, can often touch on truth, as was the case with Kravitz, Eric Clapton, and countless others. All truth is God’s truth, even if Roger Waters stumbles into it.

The Wall: Part III

After reading Dellingpole’s indictment on 70’s era rock, I went out to feed the chickens. I listened to the last ten minutes of Isaac Brown’s reaction video through my headphones while doling out grit and oyster shells to disinterested hens.

As a teenager, I didn’t fully grasp the story of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Now that I’m 48, I’ve seen people I care about wrestle with isolation and mental illness. I’ve walked alongside them, interceded for them, and seen them struggle when all I could do was pray.

I paused during the final track of the album, Outside The Wall, with ears attuned to demonic warfare, and with a history of spiritual battles under my belt.

All alone, or in twos
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down, outside the wall
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands
The bleeding hearts and the artists make their stand
And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall

I cried. Not for the song, but for all of the people constructing those walls designed to box Jesus (and family, and society) out. There is some profound understanding there for those of us who’ve done battle on behalf of God’s children, suffering behind those walls—not just the lost, but also the wounded Christian warriors, the prodigals, and the Jesus-loving oppressed.

I wasn’t dabbling in mixture. I was experiencing revelation.

The music took me to prayer, which was probably not what Pink Floyd in 1979 (or the enemy in 2025) had intended.

And it also got me wondering if any Christian artists are producing albums that hit as hard as this still does after all these years. If they are, I haven’t heard of many. We used to all the time, but that was also a couple decades ago.

We need music that explores the human condition while simultaneously pounding us with drums that stir the wild heart. Get those drummers out of those (bleeping) drum cages; the only place you ever see drum cages is in church.

We need guitar recordings that feel like they’re right there in the room with you, lyrics that make you want to drive over and give someone a hug, tempos that make us want to swirl around or jump or run, and piano players who make Harry Connick, Jr. look like an amateur.

As God’s people, we should dance wilder, play louder, and create more aggressively in all of the art forms than anyone else.

Do we have rock pioneers doing this today? Or are all of God’s musicians content with producing safe, three-cord arrangements that are perfect for Sunday morning, but will be hard-pressed to find their way onto the playlist of a struggling young man’s phone as he cruises in his F-150 on a Friday night, looking for something to do?

After my friend’s encounter with David Crowder Band, we had many fruitful conversations in the years that followed about Jesus not being a tame lion. The music provided the catalyst for ministry to a guy who wasn’t getting fed sitting in church. It still does, or can—and there is an army of fired up Jesus Freaks who are longing to hear it, and bring their friends.

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If you enjoyed this article, please check out these others as well:

1. Roger Waters, David Gilmour, and Nick Mason collaborated for The Final Cut in 1983. Noticeably missing was founding member Richard Wright. Gilmour and Mason later characterized the album as a Waters vanity project, and then (after lengthy legal wrangling) brought back Wright to reestablish Pink Floyd in 1987, minus Waters.

2. The central figure is loosely based on Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s original front man, who succumbed to mental illness early in the band’s evolution.

3. The book Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream, explores this. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s on my list.