Artist: Charles W. Burpo
Title: A Minister Speaks for God and Country
Format: LP
Label: The Bible Institute of the Air
Year: Unknown
Tracks: 2
Welcome to the penultimate "B" LP review. Consistent readers may note that, once again there has been a long time between posts. There are two reasons for this. The first is that I got bedbugs, and dealing with that took up way too much of my time. The second reason though, is that I haven't been too excited about listening to this record, so I kept putting it off.
I actually bought this record. I bought it, though, to use for samples on the ill-fated second full-length by an old punk band I used to be in. Had the band survived (and released an LP), it would have been reviewed three or four records ago on this very blog. The samples would have appeared before or during a song called "Blind Faith" that denounced dogmatic adherence to religion and the ways that it is used to justify an array of harmful policies. But instead, the album was never recorded and I was left with this piece of crap LP.
Charles Burpo, who describes himself on the back cover of this record as "fiercely against Modernism, Communism, or any evil that will threaten my Country," was (is?) as the title suggests, a minister, and this record encapsulates a sermon and his reading of the Declaration of Independence, both backed with patriotic music.
I don't have overly much to say about this LP--I'll skip over the Declaration of Independence side of the record, because it really is just him reading it dramatically. The other side, a sermon entitled "The Old Moorings," is a scree that mixes Christian fundamentalism and paranoid far-right ideology as it bemoans the supposed moral collapse of America. There's anarchy in streets, people are mocking Christianity and turning away from the true American values that generations of American veterans fought for, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. It's much of the same nonsense you'd hear today if you tuned in TBN or any number of AM radio stations around the country. The only thing interesting about it really is the fact that, although this record must be at least 35 years old (hard to say exactly, couldn't find any information about it on the Internet), the words on this record could be spoken today by any number of television or radio ministers and would not sound any more dated than anything else those folks say. The notion that the real America is about to be destroyed by Secularists, Socialists, and Bears (oh my!) hasn't changed much in 60 years.
The sad thing is, if someone listens to this record 35 years from now, they'll probably say the same thing.
Total songs listened: 816
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