The Neon God We Worship: What Rock Music Reveals About Faith

Editor’s note – We don’t often run a piece built on Simon and Garfunkel, Jim Morrison, and Chris Cornell, but the questions underneath the music are ancient. He traces a single image – a neon god built by human hands – through decades of rock and roll to ask what every generation half-knows: every substitute for God eventually flickers out, no matter how convincingly it’s dressed up.

The Song That Still Asks the Question

The classic 1964 Simon and Garfunkel song “The Sound of Silence” contains the lyrics: “And so the people bowed and prayed, to the neon god they made.”

Lay writers usually describe the meaning of the song as about the difficulty of connecting with other people in an urban landscape of smoke and mirrors. The song is that.

On a more fundamental level the song and this key lyric are instantly recognizable across time and culture as the true problem humans face: finding and seeing the true God within the holy heart of man.

In a 2015 metal rock version of the song by the band Disturbed, singer Dave Draiman screams these lyrics as savagely as he can, which is arresting to the listener and encapsulates the yearning we all feel in connecting to what is pure within us and anger at what we suppose is in the way: society, or The System, or human nature. Who constructed this neon god and imposed it upon us?

Since 1964, “The Sound of Silence” has retained relevance that seems to amplify over the years: describing what is somehow stymied in our lives. What keeps us from praying to a true god? What keeps us from living in faith?

Editor’s note – That scream in the Disturbed cover is anger at ourselves as much as at “the system.” Paul made the same point to the Romans: people didn’t lose God, they exchanged Him for something they could shape with their own hands.

Chasing Truth in a Noisy World

We spin and weave, we toil in fields, we search from here to there for “truth”: eastern philosophies, techniques of exercise and breathing, journeys, the diversional ecstasies of music, sports, nature, drugs.

But the fact of Jesus Christ stands in the way like an airport security guard: do you accept the risen God, the miracle of the Lord? Or do you reject Him as an elaborate lie? The central question of our lives must be asked and answered: “Do you believe in Jesus Christ?”

We live in the age of quantum physics: a reality holding all probability, all potential, that must be “quantized” down to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, as Jesus said:

But I tell you, do not swear an oath of any kind. All you need to say is simply 'yes' or 'no.' Anything beyond this comes from the evil one. [Matthew 5:34, 37]

Jim Morrison and the Search for Spirit

The Sound of Silence and many other iconic pieces of music were written in a time of social, cultural, and religious foment. In one telling about a popular band from the 1960’s, the Doors, many pieces of music from the era were the cries of people attempting to connect through a choking haze of drugs, fame, and errant sexuality.

Lead singer of that band, Jim Morrison, as close as it comes in popular music to the profundity of prayer and religious impulse, touched on Christian practice in his music, writings, and images, as seen in the famous “young lions” photograph from 1965. Even in the arc of Morrison’s life, a Christian theme was realized: prophetics, persecution, and sacrifice.

Morrison was in early life a practicing Christian, in adult life practicing the modern seekers’ formless and disciplineless mishmash of Native American all-pervading Great Spirit sensibility, Christian elements, and Eastern esoteric traditions. For Morrison and for many, these elements mix into the modern facsimile of religion, which beckons and informs but never seems to lead to a coherent understanding.

Morrison’s music and lyrics, alternating the prayer-like gentle with the angry, lewd, blasphemous, and shocking, seem always searching for an understanding of spirit. But each foray seems to lead to a twisted dead end, perhaps because there is not a true pathway there. Eventually, time and again, Morrison seems to be left stumbling in a “neon grove” while a sign spells out its warning above.

“And the sign flashed out its warning and the words that it was forming: It said the words of the prophet are written on the subway walls and tenement halls.”

Editor’s note – Morrison’s blend of Native spirituality, Christian imagery, and Eastern practice is a familiar recipe today. It never resolves, because the God of Scripture doesn’t share the shelf – He is the only one who is real.

The God We Build Ourselves

It is easy when young to point a finger at “they”, “society”, or “humanity” who blinded us to God’s Truth. It is harder, after some experience, as we take part in “society” at some level, with our inability to take and teach Christ, our continued searching in meandering pathways, to understand that we ourselves built and maintain the neon god, with our indecision, our self-deception, egoism, and lack of faith.

So what is wrong with a god made by man, a god made of neon? Are we not empowered by God to believe what we want?

A false god beckons toward Hell and not toward Heaven. It melts away when the soul needs to anchor on truth. It does not do God’s will but does the will of the Deceiver.

Editor’s note – This is the piece’s sharpest turn: the neon god isn’t imposed on us, we build and maintain it ourselves. That’s harder than blaming “the system,” but it’s what Scripture keeps pressing: the human heart is an idol factory, and only grace shuts it down.

The Crossroads of Choice

“No one comes to the father except through me,” Jesus said. At the crossroads where He stands, where you stand and in classic rock tradition where the Devil stands: you have a choice.

In this current time of religious foment, in 2026, during this “new visitation of energy,” we stand once again as a people asking and attempting to answer the question: what is real God made of?

We have the example of Christ, clear as day, handed down through the Book, the church, and the personal experience of anyone who believes.

One More Song, One More Nail

One last foray into popular music to help explore how the neon god was made and what keeps it hanging above so many. A song by a singer named Chris Cornell in a band called Audioslave, in the early 2000’s sang: “Nail in my head/from my creator/you gave me life now show me how to live.”

Notwithstanding the Christ imagery evoked by the “nail” (this time in the head), Cornell asks for a guide to live, an example of how to proceed and light for the way. The obscurity and distraction of our present day world (and all worlds) help to explain why we often cannot see the forest because the trees are in the way. Often we cannot see something because it is right in front of our eyes.

Coming to this crossroads contains the test of faith itself: do you recognize what stands before you, accept the truth, and shatter the neon god to release the spirit within?

A Word from the Editor
Every generation builds its own neon god, then wonders who put it there. John’s warning still stands: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21) – not exotic statues, but the substitutes we reach for when God feels too demanding or too silent. God has already stood at that crossroads Himself, in Jesus Christ, and He is still calling people toward Him.

Editor Comment: You trace the same idolatry through Simon and Garfunkel, Jim Morrison, and Chris Cornell, and that pattern points to a resistance Scripture simply calls sin. You end on Cornell's cry for a guide to live, and that choice gives the piece a clear turn toward the One who actually answers that prayer.