About the Hillsong Peace Music Video - Rant

On the 2^nd of March 2018, Hillsong Young and Free released their first music video that spoke of the issue of mental health which clearly wasn’t the type of video you would expect to see on a Christian Music channel. While I found the song to be extremely soothing, with the hate and false alarms being triggered around the video being dark, cultic (which I heard a little too much) or displaying creepy ghosts and bloody rain (laugh, if you like) I thought I’d break down portions of the video and explain it because oddly enough I’ve seen too many response videos and read too many articles and comments of people over-analysing the symbols on the video instead of receiving the message of God’s peace especially for those who struggle with anxiety on a mental health level.

“I think for a really long time I didn’t understand what anxiety is. When I look back at my whole life I feel like I can see traces of this for as long as I can remember but it wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my early twenties” –Jessie Hastings, wife of  Benjamin Hastings.

In the video PEACE- The Story, Benjamin Hastings, one of the three composers of Peace, says that he wanted to give his wife a song that she could sing when she was having panic attacks. Melodie Wagner, also one of the composers, says that it doesn’t have to be a scream from the top of their lungs but they can just say over and over and sing into their spirits and into their anxiety and depression and just know that God is with them and God is their peace.

About the video, it starts off with 5 people (some say they’re all women, some say it’s four men and one woman), four of whom are sitting on white cubes, covered in white veils with crowns on their heads.

  

Now, when I saw it for the first time I thought it was the veils of purity and crowns of glory (like most people did) until the video progressed and then I realized that there was more to the veils and crowns than what just first impressions would tell.

Melodie Wagner, the singer, comes at 0:26 and is wearing a red dress and covered in a red veil. Now, before you think she’s representing the red prostitute and the whole video is a bunch of people pretending to be Christians (well, honestly, I can’t be sure about them being Christians at heart either, can I?) and slowly infiltrating Christian Music with cultic and devilish symbols, I request you to see the context of the video and look at it in the light of mental health being an actual sickness that is not often talked about and is most of the times just casually overlooked at.

So I request you to notice. Notice how at 0:39 when the lyric says ‘There’s a peace far beyond all understanding’ there is a light that comes from above that catches the attention of the girl who is sitting on the floor at the back. 

When the lyric says ‘Dare anxiety comes I’ll remember that peace is a promise you keep’ is when she takes her crown off and her veil is also pulled in the beginning of the second stanza as she starts walking towards the ray of light. (I also saw a video where the person interpreting it says the girl is walking towards the singer in the red veil. Like come on, watch the video properly at-least.)

 That’s when I realised these weren’t the veils of purity but anxiety was represented as veils here, the veils that separated a person from everything else (I also read a comment talking about how anxiety is like this suffocating blanket that no one sees and how obvious it was that the veils represented anxiety, so I’m not making this up) and the crowns were in fact what you would call our Sunday Bests that people wear (not literally, but you get the point) to hide their struggles, to hide their emotional traumas and to hide their ugly sides because they wouldn’t be accepted that way in a church environment because church environments don’t address the issue of anxiety or mental health as a whole (atleast the churches that I know and have heard of worldwide).

So the girl is walking towards that ray of light, and notice how the other four are still with their veils and crowns meaning they still haven’t come out of their struggles or put their struggles down to walk towards the light, when a video starts playing in the background on Melodie’s side and on the veils of the four people. Now, that video is not symbolizing “social media influence” (seriously though, who comes up with such interpretations?) but is a video of various people dealing with anxiety (because the point of the music video is to portray anxiety, duh) while the girl is still walking towards the ray of light.

Notice how when the song says ‘You are peace to the restless soul’ another crown falls off showing how another person is trying to come out of his/her blanket too and when it says ‘Peace when my thoughts wage war Peace to the anxious heart’ you can see all of them (now six) who seem to be struggling with anxiety now trying to come out of their confinements, or cages (can I say that?) while Melodie who is covered in red, which I think means she is covered in the blood of Christ, is still singing, expressing her own freedom.

Notice how all of this happens until the girl reaches the light and the rest of the people in the room stand and when the lyric goes ‘I found peace far beyond all understanding’ there’s this red shower from above, which obviously is blood (I don’t understand why even the Blood of Christ part gets so much hate and misunderstanding) and this girl does a little bit of a dance in worship to finding that light which is the end of the video.

About the dress the girl in white is wearing, if you think about it, there’s nothing particularly obscene about her dress. Personally, I think it’s only fault finding and over-interpretation that would make someone think her dressing is provocative. I’m not stating that it’s the best thing to wear. I’m just saying it was decent enough unless you were concentrating so much on what she was wearing than on what the message of the song was. (I only noticed her clothes until someone pointed it out to me.) And those pointing to her “Kim Kardashian look” or about her being “too curvy”, it’s really sad to see how that would be the first thing for someone to notice in a video that talks about a totally different issue. The girl seemed fine to me. Period. And to those finding fault with the fact that she wasn’t white but coloured (which century are you living in?) get it right that Hillsong doesn’t have race restrictions (like your mind) and that she being coloured doesn’t have to indicate a bad sign!

Personally, again, I think it was very brave of Hillsong Young and Free to release such a powerful and artistic video that dealt with anxiety in its true nature instead of sugar coating it like most Christians would. Being someone who often thinks about what people would think of me if I said a certain thing or did a certain thing I admire the guts they had to put themselves in such a hard place given the fact Hillsong and especially Hillsong Young and Free is already being accused of many other things (which I will not mention here) that aren’t wrong or evil again. The truth is, anxiety can be disturbing to see and just because you and I cannot relate to anxiety on a mental health level doesn’t mean a lot of people can’t. If the video brought peace to the victims of anxiety and opened the eyes of those who weren’t victims of anxiety, then I think the video has done its job.

We have books like Job and Ecclesiastes and I rarely hear Christians question about the existence of such confusingly depressing books in the Bible. There are so many things in the Bible that we still struggle to interpret, so what’s all the frustration about a Christian video that happens to be something you cannot fully interpret?

I’m not saying it has to be your favourite video. I’m just saying that you don’t have to throw all your hate on it just because it addresses something that you cannot relate to. I hope at least now we will all open our eyes to see creativity in different forms and not just in the forms of art that we would like to see or would want to see. (I mean, Jesus didn’t appear in the form that the Pharisees expected him to come in. Look how that turned out!) Like Cesar A Cruz said (which Hillsong also quoted on their website about the Peace Music Video), “Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”. So let us accept that while the portrayal of mental health can be disturbing, the avoidance of addressing the issue is not something we are called for and is not something we should be doing as followers of Christ. The video therefore, should be appreciated for its art and I certainly don’t think that the ratio of dislikes over likes on the music video should be reason enough for someone who found comfort in the song to feel doubtful about it.

“Everyone goes through stressful situations in life and you kind of would then feel anxious symptoms but the main difference would be that it doesn’t switch off. People that don’t have anxiety don’t understand how permanent a fixture it is in your life and also then how domineering and controlling it can be.” Jessie Hastings

UPDATE: On the 18th of May, Hillsong Y&F decided to delete their music video since the overanalysing and misinterpretation of the video didn't sit well with them. Although I am saddened by the move, I do hope many other bands, both Christian and secular, do take up topics like mental health as an issue. After all, darker issues can only be portrayed if an audience is accepting to receive it.