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Don't Stop Believin': How Jonathan Cain Became Public Theologian Number One (Journey Series)

This is the first of a four-part Public Theology series, concluding in

“Jonathan Cain, America's Great Theologian. The Journey to the White House”

There's a lawn at the Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington where I first learned prayer.

I was about eight. Journey with Foreigner. Steve Augeri was singing, Jonathan Cain was on keys, Neal Schon was doing what Neal Schon always does. The adults said we were in the nosebleeds, but we were on the lawn, which was better. The lawn is big and fun. You can move. You can breathe. Nobody's blocking your view of the sky.

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Jonathan Cain, America's Great Theologian. Journey to the White House. (Journey Series)

You might not know his name, but you know his teachings.

Jonathan Cain is the most widely disseminated Christian theologian of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

That's not a compliment. That's not an insult. It's just math. More people have sung "Don't Stop Believin'" as an act of communal faith than have sung most hymns written in the last fifty years. Every karaoke bar on earth is a chapel, and that song is the call to worship. The strangers waiting up and down the boulevard are a congregation. The midnight train going anywhere is a pilgrimage without a fixed destination. And "don't stop believin'" is a credal statement that refuses to specify its object.

Believin' in what?

It never says. It structurally cannot say, because saying would limit its reach.

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People Making Mistakes: Jonathan Cain's Theology of Repentance (Journey Series)

In the final article of this series, "Jonathan Cain, America's Great Theologian," I'm going to make a hard claim about Jonathan Cain's trajectory from apophatic songwriter to the Rose Garden. Before I do that, I need to make a kind one.

Jonathan Cain is at his best when he's being a repentant failure.

That sounds unkind. It isn't. It's the highest compliment I know how to give a theologian.

Because repentance, real repentance, not the performative groveling that passes for it in most churches, is the hardest theological posture to sustain. It requires you to stay in the tension between what you did and what you meant, between who you are and who you want to be, without resolving it prematurely in either direction. No cheap grace. No self-destruction. Just the honest, uncomfortable middle.

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From Mystery Mountain to the City of Hope: Songs to Learn About. (Journey Series)

Journey has an enormous catalog, and most people know about six songs. That's fine. But if you want to understand what Journey actually is, the musicianship, the theological undercurrents, the tension between eras, the stuff that makes this band worth taking seriously, these are the songs I'd point you toward.

Some of these are deep cuts. Some of them are from albums you've never heard of. That's the point.