Mainstream religion

This video. It was love at my virgin experience of Hozier's Take Me to Church. I watch this video and I count my blessings.

The blessed outcome of a bad breakup, the song decries the fallacies of organised religion whilst revelling in the hedonic and powerful experience of love. As Nick Messitte so eloquently describes, it is a 'deliciously acidic criticism of religious institutions, particularly their interference in our bedrooms'.

Drawing on Wikipedia for some incredible insights into the songwriting, in an interview with The Irish Times, Hozier stated, "I found the experience of falling in love or being in love was a death, a death of everything. You kind of watch yourself die in a wonderful way, and you experience for the briefest moment–if you see yourself for a moment through their eyes–everything you believed about yourself gone. In a death-and-rebirth sense."

In an interview with New York magazine, he elaborated: "Sexuality, and sexual orientation – regardless of orientation – is just natural. An act of sex is one of the most human things. But an organization like the church, say, through its doctrine, would undermine humanity by successfully teaching shame about sexual orientation – that it is sinful, or that it offends God. The song is about asserting yourself and reclaiming your humanity through an act of love."

As the song rose to fame, the official video made to go along with the song was riveting political commentary of Russia's facist stance on homosexuality, which is perhaps subtly echoed in other communities, particularly those of a religious nature.

As a dance video, it took me on an exploration into Sergei Polulin's other works, as well as his stormy course as a professional dancer and growing up in Russia, as explored in a video by NOWNESS, yet another treasure trove of humans exploring humanity.

I leave you with Messitte's concluding paragraph:

We live in a complicated, often dismal world, one in which governmental powers are increasingly terrifying (from ISIS to Putin and everything in between—including aspects of our own system). 

In the United States, we find ourselves in a landscape now roiling with discomfort, in which even the most ardent democrats have lost faith with our executive branch, in which iniquities of gender and race have yet to be been addressed, in which child homelessness is on the rise, in which nearly half of us blame poor people for their own poverty while simultaneously overlooking the entrenched nature of our corporate welfare systems. 

Has any of this been reflected in the pop charts? 

Not recently; the last political protest song I can remember discussed in the mainstream was John Mayer’s “Waiting for the World to Change”—an utterly toothless and passive song if ever I heard one: 

Marvin Gaye asked us a direct and powerful question (“What’s Going On?”). John Mayer simply took a walk by the East River and waited for the world to change around his beautifully sculptured face. 

- Nick Messitte in his analysis of Hozier's Take Me To Church