It appears that every missionary gets the pop-song they deserve.

When my Dad was serving in England in the early-’70s, every trunky elder he told me sang along to Simon & Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound.” When I was serving in the early-aughts, every incoming greenie was banging out the chords to Coldplay’s “The Scientist,” as though Christ Martin had their mission in mind specifically when he falsetto’d “Nobody said it’d be easy/nobody ever said it would be this hard.”

My wife served a few years after me, and so the Coldplay song on supermarket radio that all the missionaries quietly hummed along to on P-Day–and that would still reminded them of the mission years later–was “Viva La Vida,” primarily thanks to the out-of-context line “My missionaries in a foreign field.”

The song, lyrically, is actually about a deposed tyrant who now “sweeps the streets I used to own”–which in turn is a convoluted metaphor for a break-up or whatever–and what’s more “never spoke an honest word,” and hence is perhaps the wrong song fora bunch of missionaries Raising the Standard of Truth to be humming along to themselves.

But what of that? Taking lines out of context and making them your own is a feature, not a bug, in Pop music! (It’s just a Coldplay song, for crying out loud; they were fun early on when they were basically a The Bends-era Radiohead homage, but then got progressively sillier the more they started to think they were Radiohead). Do you want “Viva La Vida” to be a mission song? Then it is a mission song! That’s the beauty of it.

I went through the same thing, in fact, with Ben Fold’s “Not the Same,” from Rockin the Suburbs (a nigh-flawless album, btw, who’s only weak-link is the title-track and its stupid name). On a strict textual level, the lyrics appear to about an evangelical preacher who only has “one good trick” to fool people with, who rakes it in with fans and money and buys into his own mythology and “[buys] it all”–that is, until cryptically, “someone died on the water-slide.” For thoroughly irreligious Ben Folds, there’s an inevitable note of melancholy and sarcasm permeating the song.

But I frankly don’t care, it will always be my mission song! “You gave your life/to Jesus Christ/you were not the same after that.” Anyone who’s served a mission understands that. “You took the word/And made it heard/And eased the people’s pain/And for that/You were idolized, immortalized/And you were not the same after that.” For many a returned missionary, there is nothing sarcastic at all in those line, but one’s lived experience, real and true.

In case you hadn’t noticed already, taking the art we love and making it our own is kind of the whole M.O. of this site. For that matter, it’s most of our M.O.s just by default; at least, that’s roughly what Rita Felski argued in 2015’s The Limits of Critique. This study was massively popular when I was in grad school–it was a much overdue reminder that the whole reason the vast majority of us get into art and literature in the first place wasn’t to critique it, wasn’t to tear it apart in a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” constantly on the look-out against the author or creator getting one over us, no: it was because we loved it, and made meaning from it. If there is ever to be a revitalization of the Humanities, it will likely come when we remember that art isn’t our enemy, but our lover. That means exploring not how art betrays its meaning, but how we create meaning out of it. That is why the phenomenon of missionaries appropriating Pop music fascinates me so.