Us and Them and CCM

How Contemporary Christian Music Explains American Christianity

A friend and I were talking once about the first concerts 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 would have hated each other in middle school, don’t you?”

One of us was 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 rebellion. Turns out, my musical taste, not his, was the dangerous one.

In her new book, God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music, scholar Leah Payne argues that anyone wishing to understand some of the most epochal shifts in American culture and politics over the past 30 years ought to listen 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 market for the CCM industry of the 1980s, 1990s, and early aughts. Our moms 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 vibrant youth group culture of the time (where I came to love CCM). Payne writes: “The quirk of CCM’s business model—that the bulk of its sales came not through mainstream retailers marketing directly to teens, but through Christian bookstores who marketed primarily to evangelical caregivers interested in passing the faith to their children—became its defining characteristic.”

The problem for “Becky,” according to Payne, was that in households where only “Christian music” was allowed, the very way a parent could convince an adolescent that he or she wasn’t missing out on anything became the very problem the caregivers were trying to overcome. Some of these 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 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 convince the Christian kids that they were the edgy ones—the non-conforming “Jesus Freaks” willing to pray 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 just geeky youth-group kids, the video suggested—they were rebels fighting against immoral, oppressive mainstream culture.”

I disagree with her at the margins, here, in that I think “Jesus Freak” was well within the bounds of a call for Christian distinctiveness. But Payne is certainly correct that an entire genre of songs went beyond this to suggest that the kid 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 same way as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Should conservative Protestant teenagers and college students be rightly equipped for the fact that they will be out of step with their peers in modern American culture? Yes.

The problem, though, is that Augustine’s City of God would not sell very well in a 20th- or 21st-century American Christian market. The nuanced truth that “You will be made to feel strange at times for following Christ, but you’re not under persecution (and, by the way, you’re not nearly strange enough in 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 are the only thing standing between Christian America and the New World Order.”

“God wants what you want (for you to be happy and healthy and flush with cash)” sells. So does “You’re the real America and everybody else wants to kill you.” Messages of actual cross-bearing and a cruciform life, however, do not sell well at all.

In Payne’s analysis, the business model of CCM looked to the marketplace “for signs of God’s work in the world,” with the top-selling artists and products reflecting “a consensus among consumers about what constituted right Christian teaching about God, the people of God, and their place in public life. Certain ideas thrived in large part because they appealed to white evangelical consumers. Other ideas faltered because they could not easily be sold.”

To some degree, that’s to be expected. The music business is, after all, a business. But, as Payne points out, some reformers (including my now CT colleague Charlie Peacock) warned of ways the business model could be at cross purposes with the teaching power of music—and many artists (such as the late Rich Mullins and Michael Card) charted a different, 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 end up with what The Guardian identified as a “market-driven approach to truth,” in which a group ends up “finding most hateful to God the sins that least tempt its members, while those sins that are most popular become redefined and even sanctified.”

The problem for all of us is that ideas of God’s blessing and spiritual warfare can 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 were not bringing in money, talk radio stations using apocalyptic language about flesh-and-blood enemies still could.

The alcoholic whose life is being messed up by his addiction is often in a stressed state of crisis because of the alcohol—a problem that he or she believes can be solved by more alcohol. A Christianity fearful of a secularizing America can often become shrill and extremist, driving away many people to whom we can 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 religion becomes perceived as a means to an end, it first draws those who care about the religion, and then it draws those who care about the end—be it “values voters” politics or “liberation theology” politics. After that, it ends up with those who really care about the end and start to see parts of the religion as the problem. Finally, it results in those who figure out they can get to the end without the religion. One can eat lots and lots of food and play football, even without following anybody to their Father’s house—as long as you fight for your right to party.

On the Left and now on the Right, the kids can look at the comparison chart and go for the real thing, whatever it is—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 very hard to remind people 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 part of the reason I came out of it more Christian than I went in. I’m amazed by how much of my incipient theology—convictions I teach to this day—was taught to me by Petra lyrics. I have never, not once in 30 years of ministry, preached Romans 6 without hearing their “Dead Reckoning” song in my mind.

I learned how to read biblical narrative Christologically, how to understand parable and poetry and paradox, from the lyrics of Michael Card. I might be embarrassed to tell you how often, in the middle of dark times, what strengthens me are words like “Where there is faith / There is a voice calling, keep walking / You’re not alone in this world” or “I’ll be a 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 that may be rock-and-roll, but I will die believing that God gave that to me.

And I see a new generation of musicians and songwriters who are 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 some of the reverberations of grace from those years still ring in some of our ears. I don’t want to reverse engineer that. We need all the music we can 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 big, big house.

What an Old Amy Grant Controversy Taught Me

Since it’s the day after Valentine’s Day, I can reminisce about how I stayed faithful to my first love, even when my friends turned against her. She was Amy Grant—and she didn’t know I existed. And then everybody got mad at her.

My fellow evangelical youth group guys were infatuated with her too, but some turned against her when she “compromised” by “crossing over” to mainstream pop music, evolving from songs such as “El Shaddai” to those such as “Baby, Baby.” More than that, she even allegedly left the top two or three buttons unbuttoned on her blouse, just as the prophecy charts had warned.

I remember saying something along the lines of, “Y’all can’t complain all the time that there are no Christians in secular music, and then blast Christians for the fact that secular people want to hear from them too.” I guess that was a practice round of learning to be suspicious of a scapegoating Christian mob.

My actual first love—my wife, Maria—teased me relentlessly when I was part of an event, as a 40-something-year-old man, at which Amy Grant was going to sing. “This was the crush of his entire preteen and teenage years,” Maria said, joking, to a friend to whom we were talking. “So he’d better behave.”

I laughed and said, “Yeah, right! Like I’d have a chance with Amy Grant!” My friend (also a musician) said, “Dude, all true, but I think you should redo that answer.” He was right, and I did. That’s what love is for—to help us through it.

I wouldn’t want to be married to anybody but Maria. I can say that and still say that Amy Grant did nothing wrong with her wardrobe choices back in the day.

As many times as we’ve laughed about that, I was unnerved when I read about the so-called “three buttons controversy” in Leah Payne’s book discussed above. Payne demonstrates—very compellingly—the conundrum of female Christian artists such as Grant. She gives example after example of how they were expected to perform with equal measures of sex appeal and purity/innocence.

Grant was supposed to be the crush of all the geeky youth group boys like me, just as she was supposed to be the role model for all the geeky youth group girls. And, at the same time, she was supposed to reinforce every biblical and/or cultural expectation of “biblical womanhood.”

That’s why so many people were furious about the three buttons, why so many people were enraged when she said in an interview that she had all the normal hormonal struggles of a person in her late teens and early twenties. Who could live up to all of those expectations?

This was the very dynamic I noticed at work in the horrors of the cover-ups of church sexual abuse and related scandals. When husbands cheated, some blowhard pastor would suggest it’s because the man’s wife had “let herself go.” When a girl or young woman was preyed upon by a pastor, she was painted as the problem, as a “temptation” wooing him away from fidelity.

Behind all of that was more than just prudery or evangelical celebrity culture. Not only could no human being live up to those expectations of them, many didn’t survive the secret, even darker expectations behind the stated ones.

Verses for the Year

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I usually choose a verse or two that, no matter where I am in my Bible reading, I will try to contemplate every day. Last year’s was this:

And though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher. And your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it,’ when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left. (Isa. 30:20–21, ESV)

This year, I have two:

Hear, O Lord, when I cry aloud;
be gracious to me and answer me.
You have said, ‘Seek my face.’
My heart says to you,
‘Your face, Lord, do I seek.’ (Psalm 27:7–8)

We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. (Heb. 6:19–20)

There’s certainly no biblical mandate or law that you should choose a verse or two to emphasize for yourself every year, but I’ve found it helpful. You might try it if you think you might find it helpful too.

Every other week, I share a list of books that one of you says you’d want to have on hand if you were stranded on a deserted island. This week’s submission comes from reader Ruth Riley from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who notes that her bookshelf is informed by the fact that she’s supposing her family would be with her. I almost objected, citing the meaning of “desert,” but then I remembered the Swiss Family Robinson, so I’ll allow it.

Here’s Ruth’s bookshelf:

I imagine if I got stuck on a desert island it would be with my family. Thus, here is my Desert Island Bookshelf to read to and with them. If I could, I would bring all the books written by each author.

Star of Light and A Young Person’s Guide to Knowing God by Patricia St. John: All of Patricia St. John’s books move my heart—a gifted writer who knew how to wrap truths about God into every story. As Churchill used to read Austen in times of distress, I read St. John.

The God Who Walks Beside Us by David Roper: Roper, a pastor who seems to have read everything, weaves great quotes through all his writings.

The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness by Timothy Keller: This short book (taken from a sermon) is one everyone should read—yearly. If I could, I’d take all of Keller’s books and hopefully would have cell service so we could listen to all his sermons.

By Searching: My Journey Through Doubt Into Faith by Isobel Kuhn: It is rare to read an autobiography where the author isn’t subtly (or not so subtly) promoting one’s self. This book is a thoughtful analysis of Isobel’s journey to Christ.

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald: A sweet fairy tale that moves the heart and soul—Tolkien, Lewis, and Chesterton also loved it.

Stand By, Boys! A True Story about Holland’s Fight Against the Sea by K. Norel: A story of a family that lived the gospel in hard times.

Into His Presence: Praying with the Puritans by Tim Chester: A collection of Puritan prayers that I want to pray for the rest of my life.

Repentance: A Daring Call to Real Surrender by C. John Miller: This book opened my eyes to my need to repent daily and the joy and peace it brings. (I love all the books by the Millers—Rose Marie, Paul, and Barbara.)

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis: I would want to take all Lewis’ books, but this one would give us plenty to muse over if we were stranded for years.

God’s Smuggler by Brother Andrew, with John and Elizabeth Sherrill: A book to read over and over of a life surrendered to God (adventure included).

Father ten Boom: God’s Man by Corrie ten Boom: I’ll be looking for Father ten Boom when I’m in heaven. Oh, to be a parent like Casper ten Boom.

The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli: I could read this book 20 times and not get tired of it.

The Voice Bible: Step into the Story of the Scripture: An easy-to-listen-to version of the Bible. Perfect for reading out loud.

Hosanna, Loud Hosannas by David and Barbara Leeman: Explanations of great hymns and their writers with beautiful artwork throughout.

Thank you, Ruth!

Readers, what do y’all think? If you were stranded on a desert island for the rest of your life and could have only one playlist or one bookshelf with you, what songs or books would you choose?

For a Desert Island Playlist, send me a list of up to 12 songs, excluding hymns and worship songs. (We’ll cover those later.)

For a Desert Island Bookshelf, send me a list of up to 12 books. If possible, include one photo of all the books together.

Send your list (or both lists!) to questions@russellmoore.com, and include as much or as little explanation of your choices as you would like, along with the city and state from which you’re writing.

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Onward,
Russell Moore