The Soundtrack for American Fascism is Worship Music

Hitler had Wagner. Trump has Chris Tomlin.

Before Adolf Hitler ever wrapped his political project in the work Richard Wagner, the composer was already the cultural framework of German life; a shorthand for seriousness, for grandeur, even for Germanness itself. By the late 19th & early 20th century, Wagner was the national soundtrack, performed in the great houses, taught in conservatories, broadcast as evidence of Germany’s superiority in art and thought.

For the bourgeois family in Berlin or Munich, to revere Wagner was to see oneself as modern yet rooted, sophisticated yet profoundly German. He was not fringe or avant-garde but canonical, an institution. Which is precisely why Hitler could seize him: Wagner had already been sanctified by the culture, his operas fused with notions of destiny and blood. All Hitler did was weaponize what was already regarded as the pinnacle of German civilization.

Worship music in America, before Trump ever laid a hand on it, was already the ambient score of white evangelical life; the background noise of youth groups, summer camps, megachurch services, suburban living rooms. Like Wagner in Germany, it is canon, the dominant sonic expression of faith for millions. The chords and choruses instigate an instant reassurance, uplift, and a haze of intimacy with God that asks nothing less of you than surrender.

For white evangelicals, to know these songs is to be inside the fold, to belong. To feel both at home in the physical location and in the body. Which is precisely why Trump’s movement can seize them so easily: worship music is already the unquestioned lingua franca of American evangelicalism, the safe and sanctified vessel through which extreme politics can be smuggled in as destiny.

For Hitler, Wagner made regarding the aesthetic project of fascism as a grand staging of inevitability. Wagner is all about destiny. The leitmotifs returning and returning until you feel you’ve heard them since the dawn of time, the sense that this crescendo was always going to happen, that this hero was always going to rise. Modern worship often functions in the same way. Repetition. Crescendo. Inevitability. And the rising hero is a blonde-haired, white Jesus.

That’s the seduction of fascism: not just that it promises triumph but that it convinces you triumph was written into the music all along. In America, Wagner would sound ridiculous, however a worship band, and a chorus you can sing with your eyes closed and one hand in the air is ready made propaganda. You don’t need to change a single thing. Trump doesn’t need Wagner. He has Chris Tomlin.

The sleight of hand is that worship music presents itself as the opposite of propaganda. It’s marketed as personal, as intimate, as you-and-God-alone-in-a-room, and yet it is consumed en masse, sung by stadiums full of people who all believe they’re having a private conversation with the divine. It’s a perfect Trojan horse: worship music as the dominant form of white culture, scrubbed clean of the Black and brown traditions it stole from, is now carrying into the bloodstream of the body politic a theology and a praxis of domination.

“The technical reproducibility of art changes the function of the work, making it a tool of ritual, and eventually, a tool of politics.” Walter Benjamin - The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

So when these household-name worship stars show up at Charlie Kirk’s memorial, they aren’t aberrations; they’re emissaries of a mainstream culture that’s been grooming its audience for decades.

At the memorial itself, nobody seemed all that sad. The absence of his parents and his sister was illuminating. It was more campaign rally than funeral. In fascism, one person doesn’t matter all that much, apart from the dear leader of course. What matters is the crowd, humming in unison like a hive that has swallowed a hymnbook. Kirk’s memorial wasn’t about a dead man at all. It was about proving the movement had new vigor and juice for whatever is coming next…