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And could this signify a momentous cultural shift?

When was the last time you heard a love song on the radio — at least, one that wasn’t decades old?

In days gone by, love songs were the original pop music cliché — almost every other pop song was about love. The Beatles set the trend, especially in their earlier songs — She Loves You, Can’t Buy Me Love, etc. The charts had plenty of love songs right through the 80s and the 90s — to name a couple of examples which spring to my mind, Crazy Love by MJ Cole or Relight my Fire by Take That.

In my opinion, things started to change after the turn of the millennium. Although there were still love songs — Hey There Delilah by the Plain White Tees or Heartbeat by Scouting for Girls come to mind — there were fewer of them. Pop music took a distinct turn towards the nihilistic. For example, the Arctic Monkeys’ debut single from 2005 was I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor, which is about being attracted to someone but hardly a love song. The Kaiser Chiefs put out Never Miss a Beat in 2008, with the refrain “It’s cool to know nothing”.

Obviously I’m speaking in very broad terms here — you can’t sum up the whole of pop music in a couple of songs — but it seems to me that ‘love’ is a rare word in pop music these days. This simply reflects the trend in wider society: people don’t talk about “falling in love” any more, they have ‘relationships’ or even ‘situationships’ (could there be a word which more perfectly expresses the nonsense and insanity of romantic relationships in the present age?). There are many reasons for this trend, some of which I explored in this podcast from a couple of years ago: [Note – video now deleted]

Pop music is something of a barometer for culture, so if there are problems in the culture it’s likely to be reflected in the songs it produces. A society which doesn’t believe in love is obviously not going to sing about it.

Given that, I find it interesting — and hopeful — that love seems to be making a resurgence in pop music.

The resurgence of love

Over the last few months I’ve noticed that songs on the radio are starting to talk about love again. For example, the second biggest song of 2024 was Benson Boone’s song Beautiful Things, which is the closest thing I’ve heard to a classic love song in a long time. (Interestingly, it also talks about God, more on that in a moment.)

Earlier this year, Pulp released a new song, Got to have love. If you haven’t heard it, do have a listen as the lyrics are very interesting. Here’s a short sample:

When love disappears, life disappears
And you sit on your backside for 25 years
And you hedge your bets
And twist and bust
And try and fail and work on an album and build a jail
And lock yourself away
From the one thing
The one thing that could save you
The one thing that scares you to death
The only thing that can bring you back to life…

Could it be that people are waking up to the fact that, without love, life is empty and meaningless? Could the popularity of these songs signify that a cultural shift is underway?

There is definitely a ‘vibe shift’ happening in our society, and it’s noticeable when it comes to Christianity. Things have changed a lot since the height of the New Atheist movement in around 2006 or so. Back then, people weren’t interested in God or the Bible, something famously summed up by Alastair Campbell’s famous comment that we “don’t do God”. By contrast, now people are increasingly keen to talk about these things — something which I wrote about last year. My sense is that people are more interested and ready to hear what the Bible has to say.

The million dollar question is, are these things related? Is the resurgence of interest in Christianity something to do with the increasing number of love songs in the charts?

Love and God go together

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate deeply over the last few years is how much love and God come together. To truly seek love is to seek God (and vice versa); to reject love is to reject God (and vice versa). No book of the Bible contains more about love than 1 John. Look at these verses:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
1 John 4:7-12

In these verses, John makes some truly astonishing claims.

Firstly, he says that “love comes from God”. John tells us that love is not something which simply happens, like a chemical or biological process. Love may have physical effects, but its origin is divine. This is why love, to quote the old expression, “makes the world go round” — because it’s a sign to us that there is more to life than simply the physical. Anyone who has had the experience of falling in love will know that love is a hugely powerful thing: you can’t control it or contain it. We experience love as human beings, but somehow it shows us that it’s bigger than us.

Secondly, John says “everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God”. I don’t think this means that anyone who experiences love in any way has a saving knowledge of God, but rather that God is the source of love and — at some level — to experience love is to know the hand of God on your life. This is why songwriters such as Benson Boone can write songs which talk about both love and God — it’s completely natural. The point John is making is that those who know God best should love most of all. You can tell whether someone is a true Christian or not by whether they truly love or not. If they don’t truly love, they do not truly know God — as in fact John goes on to say: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

Thirdly, we recognise what is love through Jesus. John understands the enormous potential to misunderstand the phrase “God is love”. It’s one of the most jaw-dropping statements in the Bible, BUT it can easily be misunderstood or twisted. It doesn’t mean, “anything we call love is God”. We as human beings are capable of getting things wrong and calling something ‘love’ which is really not — for example, mistaking lust for love. This is why we need a definition of what love is, which is what John goes on to provide: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” This is how we know what love is — not by human love, but from divine love. The astonishing heights of divine love are shown ultimately in the Son of God sacrificing himself for us on a cruel cross.

Fourthly, all Christians should demonstrate this love in their lives. As Jesus puts it elsewhere, “love one another as I have loved you”. We should make manifest this self-sacrificial love in our lives; our whole lives as Christians should be characterised by it. That doesn’t mean we’ll get things right all the time, but that as we daily walk with God and get to know him better, we will start to love others in a way we haven’t before. It is in this way that we demonstrate to the world that Jesus is alive and working in us.

Those who wish to read more on this might like to check out Francis Schaeffer’s book The Mark of the Christian.

We are at a crossroads

I think we are at a crossroads as a society. People are slowly beginning to wake up to the fact that eliminating Christianity from our culture has not been a good thing. At the same time, I think many people are unwilling to go the whole hog and embrace Christianity. People are happy for other people to embrace Christianity, but they are unwilling to put the hard work in to go to read the Bible, pray, etc. for themselves.

It seems to me at the moment that many people want all the good things which Christianity brings without having to go to all the effort of personally turning to Christ. I wonder if this is the situation we are facing when it comes to love.

Going back to the song by Pulp I mentioned earlier, there is a recognition that life is empty and meaningless without love. At the same time, talking about love or even singing about love isn’t going to fix things. Neither is going to tell people “Hey, you need to start loving again.”

On my latest podcast the other day I mentioned that Princess Kate hadn’t yet released another video in her nature series. Well, clearly she was listening, as two days later she released the latest in the series, “Summer”. The theme of the video is very much that of appreciating love and friendship. She says: “Our lives flourish when we cherish the bonds of love and friendship. So open your hearts, sing, dance, play, the days are still long. So simply love and be loved.”

The thing is, as I said in my critique of her carol service (which was on a very similar theme) — saying “love and be loved” is about as useful as telling a bird with clipped wings to fly, or telling a man in chains to be free. When we human beings turn away from God, we lock ourselves into a self-imposed prison; we break our own hearts. We try to find ways of loving other than turning to the true Source of Love — the Lord himself. We try to fill our hearts with substitutes for God, but find that they cannot satisfy. As Jeremiah puts it:

“My people have committed two sins:
They have forsaken me,
the spring of living water,
and have dug their own cisterns,
broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
Jeremiah 2:13

The problem we have as human beings is not simply that we have turned away from God. The problem is that we have tried to substitute God — the spring of living water — for other gods, things which are broken and which “cannot hold water”. That’s the real tragedy of idolatry: it is turning away from God, the source of everything good in our lives, and turning to other things which we think will make us happy but end up destroying us.

Saying “love and be loved”, therefore, without directing us to the source of that love, will not help us. In fact, if people try to find love where there is no love to be found (i.e., without God) it will end up destroying us: we will be worse at the end than we were at the beginning.

What I would say to anyone is this: if you want to embrace love, you need to embrace God. There is no other way.

If you haven’t thought about God or Christianity before, I created a whole course called “What is Christianity?” which would be perfect for you. The whole thing (9 videos) is available to watch on YouTube. Please don’t let this opportunity pass you by.