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(OPINION) With its sobering lyrics and a droning country-blues riff, “Holy Ghost Power” by The Hillbilly Thomists is a song with zero chance at Christian radio success.

The jilted protagonist has been “living off of grits, whiskey and Moon Pies.” His man cave offers no refuge: “A hundred channels of nothing on the TV at 10. It’s like Diet Coke and original sin. ... Now it’s a zombie town, there’s a lot of undead. They wander around looking underfed.”

But the chorus offers hope: “He makes a rich man poor; He makes a weak man strong. No more going wrong just to get along. I felt the force of the truth when they pierced His side. I saw the war eagle dive and I could not hide.”

It wouldn’t shock old-school country fans if this was a Johnny Cash song. But it was written by a banjo-playing Dominican friar from Georgia who has an Oxford theology doctorate and now leads the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Writing to the National Reso-Phonic Company, Father Thomas Joseph White said he likes to play this classic blues guitar in his office, “looking out at the Roman Forum that’s 2,700 years-old.”

That makes sense to The Hillbilly Thomists, a “musical collective” of Dominicans, most of whom have Bible Belt roots. The band recently staged a concert in the Grand Ole Opry and over the past decade has recorded three albums of music that would sound at home at Appalachian fairs but not in most church halls.

There’s a vital tie linking these songs to the life and work of this band of priests and brothers, said Father Simon Teller (who plays fiddle). Whether singing Appalachian hymns or their own original songs, The Hillbilly Thomists — dressed in the white habits of their order — keep returning to images of suffering, sorrow, eternity, hope, grace and redemption.

“We’re priests in the Dominican order and that kind of states our vision of the world and the faith and everything we do,” he said. “In our day job, we’re working a lot with people who are dealing with very concrete situations and have a lot of very concrete questions.”

“Holy Ghost Power,” for example, is “not sung from the voice of a clergyman. It’s sung with the voice of a man who’s living a very ordinary life that is going off the rails in a very ordinary way,” said Teller. “There’s a malaise there, and he’s unsatisfied by the things of this world.”

The band’s name is a nod to Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor and her blunt, surreal fiction. In a letter, she once said that while some had called her “a hillbilly nihilist,” she would prefer “hillbilly Thomist” — referring to her love of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas.

While many call the band’s music “bluegrass,” that label really isn’t accurate. Others have called the intense biblical language in these songs “a little Protestant,” said Father Peter Gautsch (mandolin, piano, guitar).

“Some of our songs are very biblical,” he said. “I think it’s very Catholic to draw from the beautiful imagery of the Scriptures and to be able to present the truth in the kind of packaging, so to speak, that it already comes to us in the Scriptures. ... We’re just doing music that works for our group — trying to communicate what we’re trying to say.”

The music the band most admires — an Americana mix of gospel, country, blues, folk and rock — has an “earthiness” that “you also see in Flannery O’Connor. Philosophically, that’s one way to describe what is going on,” said Father Justin Bolger (guitar, piano, accordion and bass). “She was kind of set free to write about what she saw in her own life and in the South. ... That’s a kind of Catholic idea for an artist.”

The bottom line: This isn’t “folk Mass” music or contemporary “praise music” for Protestant megachurches. This is simply the music that emerged between worship, teaching, Bible study and all the work that priests do, said Bolger.

“We’re not thinking, ‘I am a priest. I am playing this music because of this or that.’ We just jam and write songs. It’s just who we are. At the same time, it’s opening doors for people to get interested in this kind of traditional music.”

Terry Mattingly leads GetReligion.org and lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is a senior fellow at the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi.