I always thought the song was mocking Christian belief.
I wonder what Randall thinks Jesus meant when He said he didn’t come to bring peace but to divide? it’s in Luke, I think.
Jesus came to tell people they needed to repent and follow HIM.
Jesus didn’t say just be all nice to each other and stop saying things people don’t want to hear, etc.
I thought that quote from “American Pie” was a reference to the “God is dead” article from 1966.
I thought he might say the music died in church the day Charles Wesley went home to glory. That’s what I would have said, but he went down the path of a lame analogy.
If being 3000 years removed from the world of some biblical text means we cannot know the meaning of the Bible, then why bother with it? Well because we are not anywhere near that much in the dark since we have two millenia of Jewish and Christian exegesis and theology to help us out. If we make use of that, then we can have reasonable confidence we will get at least in the ballpark of what scripture means. At least. We are not in the position of teenagers not getting some pop culture references from fifty years ago, nor are we in the position of this fellow, whose method of exegesis apparently is to make it up as he goes along and oppose his opinion on scripture.
The three AM radio stations I tuned into back then wore that song out. I remember once spinning the knob away American Pie, to another, only to hear AP just starting. I spun over to the third which had a song ending, and in less than a minute on comes AP.
Digusted, I turned the radio off for a while.
I think the reference about the Trinity has to with the Jesus Movement, late 60’s, early 70’s where there was a very strong evangelistic Christian revival and rejection of the drugged out hippie, hedonistic,and paradoxically nihilistic dogma of west coast “hip” population.
“And the three men I admire most The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost....”
The patriarchy throughout the ages has promulgated this hatred of females for long enough. God is God, and not “male”. He chose to represent Himself as a male in the form of Jesus Christ only because the world was so backwards back then. And the Holy Ghost? Heck if I’m going to let any “man” guide my inner heart! /s
Seriously though - that is when “the music died” at my former church when they changed the Hymns to be “non-sexist” or whatever they called it. I think they were still working on ordering new Bibles.
I always understood that line to be referring to JFK, RFK, and MLK’s assassinations.