I have an odd pastoral confession: I find “Amazing Grace” more spiritually troubling than Slayer, Iron Maiden, Death, or many of the other heavy metal bands I grew up loving.

I want to be careful, because I know that sounds like the kind of provocative reversal a person makes for effect, the theological equivalent of wearing a Cannibal Corpse t-shirt to a church meeting just to see who flinches. That is not what I am going for.

I mean it seriously, as someone who has spent his life thinking about the ways music forms us, or deforms us, and who has come to believe that the most spiritually dangerous music rarely looks dangerous from the outside. Let me back up.

I am a pastor who listens to Slayer. I have been a Slayer fan for most of my adult life, a metal fan since I was 10, and have spent roughly that same amount of time watching people decide, without listening, that they already know what the music means and what it says about the person listening to it.

The judgment comes fast and it comes on aesthetics alone—on the way the thing looks and sounds from a safe distance, on the album art and the band name and the volume—without anyone actually sitting with what the music is doing or asking why it is doing it. People write the story in their minds simply after hearing the word “Slayer.” 

They know who listens to it and what it means about them spiritually. They are almost always wrong.

The Function of “Amazing Grace”

This is precisely the move the hymn “Amazing Grace” allows its singers to make. And it is a far more consequential one.

“Amazing Grace” was written by John Newton, an eighteenth-century British slave trader who experienced a dramatic conversion and eventually became an abolitionist. The origin story is genuinely powerful.

Newton knew what he had done. He sat with it. He called himself a wretch and meant it.

The hymn, in its original context, was an act of genuine reckoning—a man refusing to look away from the worst of what he had participated in and asking for grace anyway, not as an escape from accountability but as the only ground on which accountability could ultimately stand. That is not, in my experience, how the hymn functions now.

Throughout years of ministry, I have watched “Amazing Grace” deployed as a kind of spiritual laundering, sung with evident feeling as though the feeling itself settles the account. I have watched white congregations sing it with tears running down their faces in sanctuaries where Black people have never been made to feel welcome.

I have watched it performed at moments of public reckoning as a substitute for the reckoning itself, a way of gesturing toward repentance without undertaking it. I have watched people finish the last verse and go right back to doing the thing the song was supposedly addressing.

The hymn, in those hands, does not produce transformation; it whitewashes. It produces the sensation of transformation, the emotional release without the moral movement. That is something considerably more dangerous than a Slayer record, even one that claims God hates us all.

“Cheap Grace”

The theological term for this, roughly, is cheap grace. Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the phrase to describe grace preached as a general principle rather than a costly particular—forgiveness without repentance, absolution without transformation, the word “grace” weaponized against the demands of grace. Bonhoeffer was writing about something far larger than a hymn, but the dynamic he identified is exactly what I am describing. 

When music becomes a mechanism for feeling forgiven rather than a vehicle for a genuine encounter with what forgiveness actually requires, it becomes spiritually dangerous in a way that is much harder to see than the danger of loud guitars and aggressive drumming. Slayer, by contrast, has never given anyone permission to feel better than they should. 

Reign in Blood opens with a song about Josef Mengele and does not resolve it into a lesson. It does not offer comfort. It does not modulate into a hopeful key. It makes you sit with the weight of what human beings are capable of, and it does not let you leave early.

This is closer to the function of genuine lament—the kind you find in the Psalms, in Lamentations, in the Good Friday liturgy when it is done honestly—than what happens when Amazing Grace is used to paper over a wound that has not been cleaned.

The Moral Demands of Grace

I am not arguing that “Amazing Grace” is a bad hymn. Many of my current congregants, knowing my feelings about the hymn, have cautioned me they wish to have it sung at their funeral or memorial service.

I am arguing that it has been conscripted into a use that is the precise opposite of what it was written to do. Newton wrote it as an arrival at honesty. It has frequently been used as an escape from honesty.

The music itself is not the problem. The problem is the way it has been handed to congregations as emotional permission rather than moral demand, the way its beauty has been allowed to do the work that only repentance can actually do.

This is why aesthetics are a poor guide to spiritual danger.

The music that looks dangerous—loud, aggressive, unflinching in its depiction of darkness—tends to attract exactly the kind of scrutiny that keeps it from being misused. Nobody walks out of a Slayer concert feeling quietly absolved of something they haven’t addressed.

The music that looks safe—pretty, familiar, beloved across generations — can move through a congregation doing real damage precisely because nobody is watching it. We have inoculated ourselves against the wrong threat.

I think about my friend and former pastor, John, the one who preached a sermon titled South of Heaven the week we saw Slayer live, the one who later preached my installation at Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco. He is a man who has always understood that the Spirit moves in unexpected registers, that joyful noise does not come with an aesthetic prerequisite, that the question to ask about music is not whether it sounds holy but whether it is honest.

Honesty, in his tradition and mine, is where the spiritual work actually begins. You cannot repent of what you will not name. You cannot be transformed by a grace you have used as cover.

The Slayer albums Reign in Blood, South of Heaven, and Seasons of the Abyss name things. They are not gentle about it. But in a tradition that has too often chosen beauty over truth and called the choice sanctity, there is something clarifying about music that refuses the trade.

The most dangerous song in the American church is not the one that sounds like it came from somewhere south of heaven. It is the one that sounds like it came from somewhere north of accountability.

The horns are up. The reckoning continues.