Am I really about to post a video from Godtube? Wha? Huh?

There’s a common phenomenon in the American Church whereby it looks for people in pop culture it can latch onto and claim. They have staked their Jesus flag in everybody from Sufjan Stevens to Homer Simpson. The newest staking is Jason Castro, who has made it to the top 10 on American Idol with a string of solid-but-not-groundbreaking performances.  His high point to date (and the basis for a lot of the rumors) has been his offering of “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen, which the judges thought was pretty swell. Castro gets some serious music street-cred points for busting out a relatively-obscure tune (Shrek tie-in notwithstanding) this late in the competition. It sounded to me like Castro was actually doing his version of Gavin Degraw’s version of Jeff Buckley’s version of Cohen’s tune. What do you think: Gavin Degraw-Hallelujah (Live from Carson Daly)

While Hallelujah is lyrically Biblical, it’s thematically about relationships (Buckley claimed that the song was about the hallelujah of having an orgasm). THIS song, however, IS a Christian tune by Brandon Heath, and it’s Castro on stage at his Texas church. After the tune, you can see Castro singing BGVs on a random worship tune. TSS’ policy is to not make judgment calls on anyone’s spiritual status, but what we can say for sure is that this will surely get him some votes, since Big Church does like to support its own.