Recent histories, documentaries, and devotionals prompt fans to look back—and maybe learn some lessons—from the genre’s heyday.
The kids and youths of the Nineties are actually of their 30s and 40s, and the nostalgia of that era’s Christian music has us revisiting favorite albums and artists. This throwback fandom has revived decades-old praise songs like “Here I Am to Worship” and fueled movies that commemorate Christian Contemporary Music (CCM), just like the 2021 Netflix summer camp musical A Week Away and the documentary love letter The Jesus Music.
With our nostalgia comes recent interest within the history of the fashionable Christian music industry, its fundamental characters, and the political and social conditions that produced what we now call CCM—not a musical genre but a distinct segment industry that produced Christian music modeled on mainstream pop and rock, built on a shared faith somewhat than on a specific musical style.
An array of recent books and movies have got down to tell the story of the Christian music industry. There’s Jesus Revolution, a feature film directed by Jon Erwin and Brent McCorkle; Mixtape Theology: 90s Christian Edition, a devotional and CCM retrospective by William “Ashley” Mofield and Rachel Cash; and historian Leah Payne’s recent book, God Gave Rock & Roll to You. Later this yr, documentarian Jason Ikeler will release his film, Safe for the Whole Family: How to Make a Christian Superstar.
Each try to capture the CCM story—whether historical, devotional, or fictionalized—assigns boundaries and attributes significance to particular figures, events, and albums. The growing body of labor on the topic reflects a negotiation around which accounts are a part of the “real” story of CCM, and who gets to inform it.
And as evangelicals debate the merits of self-criticism, the historiography of …
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