Hutch Harris said of The Thermals’ album, The Body, The Blood, The Machine, “[It is] a science fiction tale of what could happen in this country if we continued to let Christian nut jobs run it.” As religion is central to the album’s theme, the Bible is a natural subject for Harris’s lyrics. Harris incorporates biblical plots in order to reveal the dangers of their modern interpretations and applications. His words reveal that he is hostile to religion, as it makes its followers feel entitled and pure, and his narratives reveal that he feels God’s acts of purification are to blame. In Harris’s science fiction future of America, it is the sense of entitlement and purity that religious followers obtain from reading these stories that leads to an oppressive, totalitarian state. Two songs on the album reveal Harris’s distaste for divine acts of purification. In both songs, such actions lead man to behave as though he were God. Harris’s fundamental complaint about religion seems to be that its stories so often discuss the destruction of impure on Earth that its followers sees themselves as the pure and feel entitled to impose their morality on others in order to purify the Earth. The songs, “A Pillar of Salt” and “Here’s your Future” both use biblical plots to convey Harris’s complaints about religion in America.
Hutch Harris discusses the story of Noah and the flood in “Here’s your Future”:
God reached his hand down from the sky
He flooded the land then he set it on fire
He said, "Fear me again. Know I'm your father.
Remember that no one can breathe underwater"
So bend your knees and bow your heads
Save your babies, here's your future
Yeah, here's your future
God reached his hand down from the sky
God asked Noah if he wanted to die
He said no sir
Oh, no, sir
God said here's your future:
It's gonna rain
So we're packing our things
We're building a boat
Where God will create the new master race
Cause we're so pure
Oh, we're so pure
So here's your future
God told his son it's time to come home
I promise you won't have to die all alone
I need you to pay for the sins I create
Son said, "I will but Dad, I'm afraid"
Yeah, so here's your future
Prior to reflecting on Harris’s message about and attitude towards religion, it is important to analyze the differences between Harris’s version of the flood story and the actual biblical version; understanding the differences reveals Harris’s interpretation of modern religion and its followers, along with his message about them.
In his book, Genesis: a Commentary, Gerhard Von Rad comments that, ““The stories of the Fall, of Cain, and of Noah show God's forgiving and supporting act of salvation.” But Harris conceives of a God with no eye for forgiveness or salvation. Instead, the God of Harris’s flood story is corrupt, forcing man to pay for the sins of His creation. In the bible, God is depicted regretful and sad over the sins of man: “And the Lord regretted that He had made man upon the earth, and He became grieved in His heart.” (Genesis 6:6.) The biblical God’s creation has become corrupt, and in his sadness, he resolves to undo his creation. He sees that He has made a mistake: “…for I regret that I made them.” (Genesis 6:7.) Hutch Harris’s God, meanwhile, is angry over a lack of worship and feels unaccountable for His mistakes; in wiping out almost all of mankind, He forces His creation to “pay for the sins I create” and demands that man “fear me again.” Whereas the biblical God wipes out almost all of his creation out of regret and keeps the man who is righteous, The Thermals’ God intimidates Noah into worship with the threat of death so that God may create a “new master race”. Also different is the finality of God’s decisions. Von Rad comments that in the flood story, God’s judgment is not final, for after deciding to blot out man from the Earth, He realizes that Noah is a righteous man and forsakes Noah’s bloodline. Meanwhile, Harris’s God kills all of man except for the one man he chooses to intimidate into fearing Him. The biblical story depicts God as forgiving in that the righteous are forsaken from death, whereas the Thermals’ story depicts God as wrathful, a force that bullies one man into righteousness so that He may recreate a race of man that fears Him.
Harris’s words clearly indicate his hostility towards religion. He depicts God as a petty being obsessed with having man fear Him. Furthermore, Harris’s God lacks the forgiveness and supporting act salvation that Von Rad discusses. Every action God takes includes an element of anger, and instead of saving Noah out of appreciation for Noah’s righteousness, God forsakes Noah in order to create a master race of the righteous through intimidation. Harris’s God is absolute and angry.
Harris’s interpretation of the flood story suggests that there is nothing special about religious followers, whom he refers to as nut jobs. In killing all of man, God kept one bloodline in order to create a new master race. Nowhere does Harris indicate that Noah deserves to be saved more than any other man. Harris’s God is vain and cannot have his heart compelled by a righteous man; instead, He selects one man and intimidates him. Harris depicts God as such to argue that there is nothing special about man that descends from God. Yet in Harris’s story, the generation of man that God saves seems to think otherwise: “We're building a boat/ Where God will create the new master race/ Cause we're so pure”. Harris drops his voice as the narrator and instead employs the voice of his character in order to mark the distinction between the narrator’s tale and the character’s misperception of his role in the story. The character comes to believe that he is “so pure” without any indication in the narration that the character is any different from the rest of humanity.
The next line reveals Harris’s commentary on contemporary future. Directly following man’s misperception that he is pure and chosen for a reason pertaining to his own character, Harris returns to his narrative voice and says, “So here’s your future.” Given that Harris wrote the album about America’s future if the Christian right took power, this line is an indication that Harris has misgivings about the religious dating back to a sense of entitlement and chosenness which they derive from the Bible. Harris refers to the future as yours, speaking directly to those who feels they are pure and apart of God’s master race. .