A friend and I were talking once in regards to the first concert events we ever attended. His was Van Halen; mine was Amy Grant.
“Okay, second concert?” he asked.
Him: Mötley Crüe. Me: Petra.
After a minute or two of silence, he said, “You realize we’d have hated one another in middle school, don’t you?”
One of us was a part of a sheltered subculture quickly passing away. The other listened to music that was a gateway drug to what some say led to riots and revolt. Turns out, my musical taste, not his, was the harmful one.
In her latest book, God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music, scholar Leah Payne argues that anyone wishing to know a few of the most epochal shifts in American culture and politics over the past 30 years must take heed to the radio—specifically to the contemporary Christian music (CCM) genre of a generation of white evangelicals.
Payne writes that teenage kids like me were actually not the marketplace for the CCM industry of the Nineteen Eighties, Nineties, and early aughts. Our mothers were. Payne reveals industry executives even had a collective name for the suburban middle-class mother who sought out Christian alternatives to popular music for her children: “Becky.”
The second avenue was the colourful youth group culture of the time (where I got here to like CCM). Payne writes: “The quirk of CCM’s business model—that the majority of its sales got here not through mainstream retailers marketing on to teens, but through Christian bookstores who marketed primarily to evangelical caregivers all for passing the religion to their children—became its defining characteristic.”
The problem for “Becky,” in accordance with Payne, was that in households where only “Christian music” was allowed, the very way a parent could persuade an adolescent that she or he wasn’t missing out on anything became the very problem the caregivers were attempting to overcome. Some of those kids, Payne notes, used the CCM comparison charts “to reverse engineer their listening tastes.” She quotes one CCM listener saying, “The charts said I would really like Audio Adrenaline if I liked the Beastie Boys. That’s how I fell in love with the Beastie Boys.”
How does an industry solve that problem? Payne argues that one key way was to persuade the Christian kids that they were the edgy ones—the non-conforming “Jesus Freaks” willing to wish in public and to abstain from sex until marriage. Citing DC Talk’s “Jesus Freak” music video, Payne writes: “Christian teens who listened to CCM were not only geeky youth-group kids, the video suggested—they were rebels fighting against immoral, oppressive mainstream culture.”
I disagree together with her on the margins, here, in that I believe “Jesus Freak” was well inside the bounds of a call for Christian distinctiveness. But Payne is actually correct that a complete genre of songs went beyond this to suggest that the child who feels made fun of for attending a See You At The Pole prayer event is being persecuted by a hostile culture in almost the identical way as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Should conservative Protestant teenagers and college students be rightly equipped for the incontrovertible fact that they will probably be out of step with their peers in modern American culture? Yes.
The problem, though, is that Augustine’s City of God wouldn’t sell thoroughly in a Twentieth- or Twenty first-century American Christian market. The nuanced truth that “You will probably be made to feel strange at times for following Christ, but you’re not under persecution (and, by the way in which, you’re not nearly strange enough within the ways Jesus actually called you to be)” isn’t nearly as exciting as, “This is the terminal generation. The elites are out to destroy you, and you might be the one thing standing between Christian America and the New World Order.”
“God wants what you wish (so that you can be completely satisfied and healthy and flush with money)” sells. So does “You’re the true America and everybody else desires to kill you.” Messages of actual cross-bearing and a cruciform life, nonetheless, don’t sell well in any respect.
In Payne’s evaluation, the business model of CCM looked to the marketplace “for signs of God’s work on the planet,” with the top-selling artists and products reflecting “a consensus amongst consumers about what constituted right Christian teaching about God, the people of God, and their place in public life. Certain ideas thrived largely because they appealed to white evangelical consumers. Other ideas faltered because they might not easily be sold.”
To some extent, that’s to be expected. The music business is, in any case, a business. But, as Payne points out, some reformers (including my now CT colleague Charlie Peacock) warned of the way the business model may very well be at cross purposes with the teaching power of music—and plenty of artists (reminiscent of the late Rich Mullins and Michael Card) charted a special, more theologically grounded and biblically holistic course.
When the consensus determines what’s acceptable as a Christian and what’s not, one cannot help but find yourself with what The Guardian identified as a “market-driven approach to truth,” wherein a gaggle finally ends up “finding most hateful to God the sins that least tempt its members, while those sins which are hottest turn out to be redefined and even sanctified.”
The problem for all of us is that ideas of God’s blessing and spiritual warfare may be reverse engineered too. When the business model for Christian bookstores and CCM faltered, what many found would still appeal was politics. When music about God and Christ weren’t bringing in money, talk radio stations using apocalyptic language about flesh-and-blood enemies still could.
The alcoholic whose life is being tousled by his addiction is commonly in a stressed state of crisis due to alcohol—an issue that she or he believes may be solved by more alcohol. A Christianity petrified of a secularizing America can often turn out to be shrill and extremist, driving away many individuals to whom we are able to then point and say, Look at how the country’s secularizing! We need more fear of it!
So the cycle moves ever along.
And, as with every ideology in any generation, once a faith becomes perceived as a method to an end, it first draws those that care in regards to the religion, after which it draws those that care in regards to the end—be it “values voters” politics or “liberation theology” politics. After that, it finally ends up with those that really care in regards to the end and begin to see parts of the faith as the issue. Finally, it ends in those that work out they will get to the top without the faith. One can eat lots and a lot of food and play football, even without following anybody to their Father’s house—so long as you fight in your right to party.
On the Left and now on the Right, the youngsters can have a look at the comparison chart and go for the true thing, whatever it’s—whether it’s the Marxist dialectic or the white identity ethno-nationalism. When the market is the measure of truth, and the market becomes disenchanted with its own mission, it is extremely hard to remind individuals who they once believed themselves to be.
Contemporary Christian music, flawed as any human endeavor is, was a positive force in my life. The music of Amy Grant and Rich Mullins went with me through an adolescent spiritual crisis and are probably a part of the explanation I got here out of it more Christian than I went in. I’m amazed by how much of my incipient theology—convictions I teach to this present day—was taught to me by Petra lyrics. I even have never, not once in 30 years of ministry, preached Romans 6 without hearing their “Dead Reckoning” song in my mind.
I learned how you can read biblical narrative Christologically, how you can understand parable and poetry and paradox, from the lyrics of Michael Card. I is perhaps embarrassed to inform you how often, in the midst of dark times, what strengthens me are words like “Where there’s faith / There is a voice calling, keep walking / You’re not alone on this world” or “I’ll be a witness within the silences when words usually are not enough” or “God is on top of things / We will select to recollect and never be shaken.” None of which may be rock-and-roll, but I’ll die believing that God gave that to me.
And I see a latest generation of musicians and songwriters who’re preparing—often without institutional props—to drive others to the actual Bible, to the actual Jesus, whether it sells or not. The path from CCM glory days to an evangelicalism in crisis should inform us—and Payne’s book does that brilliantly.
But it’s also true that a few of the reverberations of grace from those years still ring in a few of our ears. I don’t wish to reverse engineer that. We need all of the music we are able to get, especially that which doesn’t just reinforce what already stirs our passions, what already makes us afraid.
There’s room for that. It’s a giant, big house.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
