ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that music can offer a particularly helpful way of understanding religious faith. Music appears to be socially unproblematic whereas religious faith can be full of problems and social dangers. Like religion, music has historically undergone a constant secularization within a dynamic of sacred and secular. James Macmillan has articulated his passionate and socially radical Catholicism in public discussions of his musical work. Music and religious faith raise similar questions about priorities and particularism. In The Dignity of Difference the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues for something very similar in relation to religious faith. In the revised version of this book he writes explicitly as an Orthodox Jew and as a 'particularist', that is as one who believes that Jews have been particularly chosen by God to be different. Wagner's music became dangerously associated with Hitler and even J. S. Bach's St John Passion has been identified with anti-Semitism.
