Learning about God in popular music. Postmodern catechist identity construction and experience in music

Music and religion are concepts, which have been continually associated with spirituality throughout the history of Western religion. Since the dawn of mankind, it has been considered that music has had a clear function about how individuals grasp their inner emotions to reach the transcendent and comprehend "Self". The aim of this thesis is to gain greater understanding as to how a group of young catechists in the Swedish Lutheran Church feel, interpret and construct their identities through popular music. An exploration as to how this specific group perceives concepts such as the Bible, church, spirituality, and religion was undertaken. The theory forming the basis of this essay is derived from a sociological perspective of postmodernism. Ten fourteen year-old students were subject to semi-structured, qualitative interviews, of which the results were analyzed using both phenomenology and phenomenography. Analysis of the results implies that this specific group of catechists demonstrated lacking the ability to locate and understand spiritual references or messages, regarding the Bible or transcendent, in popular music. It is the proposal of this study that the lack of understanding has four possible causes: a broken chain of tradition, a crisis of linguistic knowledge, music is used to comfort rather than to understand inner spirituality, and the church is used a resource to create social, cultural and traditional meaning to conclusions concerning life issues