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A A friend and I were talking one day about the first concerts we attended. It 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 do realize we would have hated each other in middle school, right?”
One of us was part of a rapidly disappearing sheltered subculture. The other listened to music that was a gateway drug to what some say led to riots and rebellion. Turns out it was my musical taste, not his, that was the most dangerous.
In his short story book, God Gave You Rock and Roll: A History of Contemporary Christian Musicscholar Leah Payne argues that anyone who wants to understand some of the most momentous changes in American culture and politics over the past 30 years should listen to the radio, especially the contemporary Christian music (CCM) genre of a generation white evangelicals.
Payne writes that teenagers like me were actually not the market for the CCM industry of the 1980s, 1990s and early ’90s. Our mothers were. Payne reveals that industry executives even had a collective name for the suburban middle-class mother who sought Christian alternatives to popular music for her children: “Becky.”
The second avenue was the vibrant youth group culture of the time (which is where I came to love CCM). Payne writes: “The oddity of CCM’s business model – that the bulk of its sales came not from traditional retailers who marketed directly to teenagers, but from Christian bookstores which marketed primarily to evangelical caregivers interested in transmitting faith in their children – became his defining characteristic. .”
The problem for “Becky,” according to Payne, was that in homes where only “Christian music” was allowed, the very way a parent could convince a teenager that he lacked nothing became the caregivers’ own problem. were trying to overcome. Some of these kids, Payne notes, used the CCM comparison charts “to reverse engineer their listening tastes.” She quotes a CCM listener as saying, “The charts said I’d 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 this problem? Payne argues that one of the main ways was to convince Christian children that they were the most nervous – the non-conforming “Jesus Freaks” willing to pray in public and abstain from sex until marriage. Quoting DC Talk’s “Jesus monster“, Payne writes: “The Christian teenagers who listened to CCM were not just geeky youth group kids, the video suggested, they were rebels fighting against the immoral and oppressive mainstream culture.”
I disagree with her on a marginal point here, in that I think “Jesus Freak” fell well within the bounds of an appeal to Christian distinctiveness. But Payne is certainly right that a whole genre of songs has gone beyond that to suggest that the child who feels mocked for attending a prayer event at the meeting at the pole is being persecuted by a hostile culture almost in the same way as Shadrach, Meshach. , and Abednego.
Should conservative Protestant teenagers and students be rightly prepared for the fact that they will be out of step with their peers in modern American culture? Yes.
The problem, however, is that Augustine’s speech City of God would not sell very well in a 20th or 21st century American Christian market. The nuanced truth that “You will sometimes feel strange following Christ, but you are not persecuted (and, by the way, you are not strange at all) enough the way Jesus really called you to be)” is not as exciting as “We are in the terminal generation. The elites want to destroy you, and you are the only thing standing between Christian America and the New World Order.
“God wants what you want (that you be happy, healthy, and wealthy)” sells. The same goes for “You are the real America and everyone wants to kill you.” However, the messages of true cross and cruciform living do not sell well at all.
In Payne’s analysis, the CCM business model looked to the marketplace “looking for signs of God’s work in the world,” with best-selling artists and products reflecting “a consensus among consumers about which constituted right Christian teaching about God, God’s people and their place in public life. Some ideas thrived largely because they appealed to white evangelical consumers. Other ideas failed because they couldn’t be easily sold.
To a certain extent, this was to be expected. The music business is after all a business. But, as Payne points out, some reformers (including my current CT colleague) Charlie Peacock) warned that the business model might be at odds with the educational power of music – and many artists (like the late Rich Mullins and Michael Card) have charted a different, more theologically grounded and biblically holistic path.
When consensus determines what is acceptable as a Christian and what is not, one cannot help but end up with what is acceptable as a Christian. The Guardian identified as a “market-driven approach to truth”, in which a group eventually “finds the most heinous sins against God that tempt its members the least, while the most popular sins are redefined and even sanctified.”
The problem for all of us is that the ideas of God’s blessing and spiritual warfare can also be reverse engineered. When the Christian bookstore and CCM business model collapsed, what many still found appealing was politics. When music about God and Christ didn’t make money, radio stations talking about flesh-and-blood enemies still could by using apocalyptic language.
The alcoholic whose life is blighted by his addiction is often in a state of crisis stress because of alcohol – a problem he believes can be solved by more alcohol. A Christianity that fears a secularized America can often become shrill and extremist, driving away many people to whom we can then point the finger and say: Look how the country is becoming secularized! We need more I’m afraid of it !
The cycle therefore always advances.
And, as with any ideology, regardless of generation, once a religion is seen as a means to an end, it first attracts those who care about religion, then it attracts those who care of the end – whether it is the politics of “voter values”. or the politics of “liberation theology”. After that it ends with those who Really care about the end and start to see parts of religion as the problem. Eventually this results in those realizing that they can go all the way without religion. You can eat a lot of food and play soccer, even without following anyone to your dad’s house, as long as you fight for your right to party.
On the left and now on the right, children can look at the comparative picture and turn towards reality, whatever it may be – whether it is Marxist dialectic or white identity ethno-nationalism. When the market is the measure of truth and the market becomes disenchanted with its own mission, it is very difficult to remind people of what they once believed they were.
Contemporary Christian music, as imperfect as any human endeavor is, has been a positive force in my life. The music of Amy Grant and Rich Mullins accompanied me through a teenage spiritual crisis and is probably part of the reason I emerged more Christian than when I left. I am amazed at how much of my emerging theology – my beliefs – that I teach to this day, Petra’s words were taught to me. I have never, not once in 30 years of ministry, preached Romans 6 without hearing their song “Dead Reckoning” in my spirit.
I learned to read the biblical story christologically, to understand the parable, the poetry and the paradox, thanks to the words of Michael Card. I might be embarrassed to tell you how many times, in the midst of dark times, what strengthens me are words like “Where faith is / There is a voice calling, keep walking / You don’t ‘I’m not alone in the world’ or ‘I will witness in the silences when words are not enough’ or ‘God is in control / We will choose to remember and never be shaken. » None of this may be rock and roll, but I will die believing that God gave it to me.
And I see a new generation of musicians and songwriters who are preparing — often without institutional support — to lead others to the real Bible, to the real Jesus, whether it sells or not. The journey from the glory days of CCM to evangelicalism in crisis should enlighten us – and Payne’s book does so brilliantly.
But it is also true that some of the reverberations of grace from those years still ring in some of our ears. I don’t want to reverse engineer it. We need all the music we can get, especially music that doesn’t just reinforce what already fuels our passions, what already scares us.
There’s room for that. It’s a big, big house.
Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief of Christianity today and directs its public theology project.
