For many people, religious music is pretty cut and dry. If it is not "Amazing Grace", or something similar, it is not religious. This thought process though is blind to the fact that "the ultimate questions and concerns of human existence and meaning are played out in many 'secular' modes of musical expression" (Pinn, 2).
Take Linkin Park's "In the End". It is a song about a person's struggle to find meaning in life in a world where "time goes right out the wind", and where the ultimate understanding is that "in the end it doesn't even matter" (remind you much of Ecclesiastes?). It is not clear what the trust is being put in or why everything falls through in the end, but this simple act of putting faith in something "unreal" is an attempt to make order out of the chaos and disorder of life. Spoken in a more religious sense, this human struggle functions as a way to try to understand and crossover from the profane world to the sacred.
Linkin Park is by no means a religious band, but in sharing its pain and difficulty in trying to understand the sacred, it acknowledges the "necessary nature of the struggle for life-meaning found within a cultural production in general" (Pinn, 22). It is this universal struggle for truth that has caused the music video to receive over 100,000,000 hits on youtube and has allowed it, in many ways, to act more religiously than songs that take the sacred as a given and simply lift it up.
