Roll Over Beethoven, Tell Martin Luther the News: American Evangelicals and Rock Music

William D. Romanowski

American evangelicals have long been marked by their identification with common people and their passion for communicating the gospel message. Moreover, new communications technol- ogies have always had strong religious implications for evangelicals, who generally saw every new medium as a means of mass evangelization. Evangelical groups used contemporary idioms in radio, recording, television, film, and advertising for evangelism (Hatch 71-82; Carey; Schultze 248). In the 1940s, radio evangelist Charles D. Fuller’s national radio broadcasts, “The Pilgrim Hour” and “The Old Fashioned Revival Hour,” had audiences that surpassed those of most popular secular shows at the time. In the following decades, Billy Graham used the new television medium for the same religious purpose. By the 1980s, televangelist Pat Robertson had established the Christian Broadcast- ing Network, a satellite T V network designed to beam the evangelical gospel around the world (Marsden Reforming; Ostling 62-69).

Music was a favorite vehicle for evangelical expression. The preaching of post-Civil War revivalist Dwight L. Moody was inseparable from the hymns of his songleader and composer Ira B. Sankey. Sankey published a series of volumes, called Gospel Hymns, that together included over seven hundred hymns (Kingman 167). Music was central to the group psychology and emotional style of Billy Sunday revivals in the early twentieth century. Gospel singer George Beverly Shea performed regularly at Billy Graham crusades in the 1950s. The use of popular music in association with evangelization, then, was not something unique to the religious revival in the late 1960s and early seventies.2 Members of the youthful Jesus Movement, which was a curious synthesis of American fundamentalism and the 1960s counter- culture, began using existing rock music for the purpose of evangelism among alienated youth of the Vietnam Era. These evangelical hippies created “Jesus Rock,” the precursor to “contemporary Christian music” (CCM). Contemporary Christian

music, by far the most successful style under the generic label “gospel,” encompassed just about all of the musical styles current on the popular charts, including folk, country, middle-of-the-road (MOR) easy listening, contemporary rock and pop, hard rock, new wave, heavy metal, soul gospel, jazz-rock, a cappella, and rap. It is best defined as evangelical popular music that co-opted existing popular music styles with religious lyrics added for ecclesiastical purposes, specifically, worship and evangelism. The CCM industry, then, had a strong religious orientation and peculiar aesthetic. No other form- of popular music was distinguished solely by its “spiritual” dimension, displayed in the lyrics without regard for musical style. Even traditional gospel music, i.e. southern gospel and country gospel, had some musical distinction as well as followers outside the evangelical church commun- ity. This was especially true of black gospel, which had a strong cultural compatibility with other forms of popular music. CCM also differed from traditional gospel in that it was marketed almost exclusively to a religious subculture, namely the burgeoning evangelical youth culture and not the longstanding traditional gospel audience.

The CCM industry emerged as a subcultural phenomenon within the larger context of the mainstream recording industry and American culture. This intermingling of sacred and secular cultures became a very complex affair. Evangelical Christians felt that their participation in many cultural activities, including popular entertain- ment, was justified by service of evangelistic ideals. In the CCM industry these ideals existed alongside the values and practices in the world of free-market enterprise. Gospel industry personnel had to put their faith into practice in the profit-oriented record business. To unravel the entanglement of evangelical and capitalist sensibilities this essay describes the evangelical worldview that animated the CCM industry while simultaneously locating CCM in the stream of American popular music. The fusion of business and religious values and

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80 purposes was problematic from the start and had serious implications for the establishment and direction of the contemporary Christian music industry which emerged during the 1970s as a quasi- parachurch ministry. Its own justification was that contemporary rock music was an effective vehicle for bringing the evangelical message of personal salvation through Christ to the modern youth culture. What was unprecedented about the CCM industry was that i t was the most extensive attempt to merge religious music with the commercializa- tion and industrialization of the popular entertain- ment industry.

Journal of American Culture they often viewed common cultural activity as inherently evil. Particular activities and artifacts were meaningful only insofar as they served a higher “sacred” end, which typically meant either edification or especially evangelization-spreading the evangelical gospel and reaping the spiritual harvest of saved souls. Politics, economics, science, art, and entertainment, in and of themselves, were considered worldly activities by many evangelicals. In other words, these were “secular” activities; an evangelical’s involvement in culture was legitimat- ized largely by the goal of evangelization rather than political involvement, industrial work, scientific research, or creative artistry per se.

This evangelical worldview, which tended to evaluate all human endeavors according to evangelistic value, shaped the way evangelicals thought about, produced, and consumed culture. The result was that evangelicals had a very narrow view of culture; evangelical cultural concerns did not extend much beyond religion and morality. Other cultural activities were given attention or evaluated insofar as they allowed for propagation of the evangelical faith and supported (or violated) evangelical ethics.

This resulted in an intense personalism among evangelicals. In matters of personal piety, which took precedent over public life, the Bible served as a guide. In areas of life and thought other than religion and morality, evangelicals “succumbed to secularization,” one evangelical writer argued. “Except over a very narrow field of thinking, chiefly touching on questions of personal conduct, we [evangelicals] in the modern world accept, for the purposes of mental activity, a frame of reference constructed by the secular mind and a set of criteria reflecting secular evaluations” (Blamires 3-4). In other words, rather than using a Biblical anthropology as a basis for intellectual and cultural activity, evangelicals relied on other secular perspectives often grounded in assumptions antithetical to the Bible. Biblical norms were reserved for the church, theology, and personal morality.

This two-realm worldview, which separated religion from culture, severely limited the relation of personal faith to public life. This limitation was enhanced for evangelicals by their belief that this present world system would pass away and be replaced by a perfect order under Christ’s rule. Evangelicals directed their energies to the new heavens and new earth that the Bible promised would be established at Christ’s return. Evangelism was paramount, relegating other cultural activity to an inferior status.

Only Visiting This Planet The contemporary Christian music industry

was much more than a specialty music market. It emerged as a paradigm community, an identifiable socio-religious group sharing a belief system and values. Everyone involved in production and consumption-record executives, management, artists, agents, promoters, retaiIers, journalists, youth leaders, and fans-were included in the contemporary Christian music “community.” Members sometimes went so far as to refer to the entire industry as a “family” (Goldberg 10). The CCM industry showed how diverse American cultural traditions are combined to establish a common vision for a subcultural group existing within a broader pluralistic society. The most salient feature in the evolution of the CCM industry was the continual coalescing of evangelical commitments and beliefs with other social and cultural trends in America, especially those that animated the mainstream entertainment industry. The paradigm that emerged from this interaction became a complex web of religious and industrial values that formed the basis of identity, achieve- ment, strategy, and purpose for the CCM industry.

Central to the evangelical worldview was the relation of Christianity to culture. This has been a perennial problem surfacing in ongoing evangelical controversies about the relation of personal faith to politics, the role of religion in public education, and the place of Christian ethics in the business world. These debates have resulted in a variety of responses rather than a single strategy about how followers of Jesus Christ are supposed to relate their faith to culture.3

For many evangelicals, cultural activity was considered mere human achievement and was associated with “secular” society, referred to as “the world.” The values of the world were temporal, the laws of God eternal. Because these evangelicals emphasized the complete depravity of humankind,

American Evangelicals and Rock Music 81 There was a persistent tension in this

evangelical paradigm that quickly became manifest in the contemporary Christian music industry. The CCM industry evolved as more than just a commercial enterprise; artists, executives, and fans alike considered it a “ministry,” the music being the medium for evangelization. Evangelicals adopted rock music for religious worship and evangelism, not principally for entertainment or enjoyment. They wanted to merge ecclesiastical functions for music with the business and marketing practices of the secular entertainment industry. Evangelical rockers were not simply pop musicians but ministers of the gospel through rock ’n’ roll. “Christian musicians,” asserted one writer, “should be ministers singing mini-sermons or lessons” (Menconi 19). Concerts became worship services or evangelistic meetings.

It was not easy, however, to thrive in the gospel specialty market. In the larger recording industry, companies relied on the enormous sales generated by superstar artists to finance the higher proportion of projects that barely recouped production costs- if they ever returned a significant profit. In comparison, the evangelical market was relatively small and over-saturated with talent. Even the highly profitable CCM artists, of whom there were only a few, paled in financial comparison to their counterparts in the mainstream industry. Much of the problem had to do with exposure. The mainstream recording industry operated with national and international systems for exposure (radio, television, video channels) and distribution (retail stores, record clubs). With little access to these avenues, the CCM industry had little choice but to use religious broadcasting stations and bookstores to created an alternative evangelical network modeled after its secular counterpart. Ironcially, the result was that CCM reached few non-evangelicals.

Nevertheless, establishing an evangelical recording network seemed perfectly reasonable to evangelicals in the CCM industry. To evangelicals, the marketing strategy of the mainstream entertain- ment business matched the evangelistic goals of the gospel industry. The success of evangelism was calculated by the number of souls that were saved; “souls” were consumers, as measured by record sales, airplay, and concert tickets. “What we are are packagers of ministries,” explained one gospel record executive. “We package an artist’s ministries in such a way that i t can be multiplied to the greatest number of people. The lives of these people reflect the Word of God; if they didn’t, we wouldn’t be in the business” (“Word Records” 25). These

business-minded musical troubadours for the Lord increasingly relied on the models, strategies, and practices of the profit-oriented mainstream recording industry. Gospel industry people believed that this fusion of marketing and ministry would simultaneously save souls and generate profits. Soon, however, evangelism became the industrial rhetoric, not the spiritual reality, of evangelical popular music. This rhetoric justified the industry to the evangelical community and to the industry itself, which wanted to believe in the propaganda value of its work.

Christian Lyrics For The Devil’s Music? Its religious orientation aside, CCM was

something of an oddity in the stream of American folk and popular music. Its evolution was quite different from that of other types of American popular music. While other popular music genres were rooted in religious or other cultural traditions, CCM was largely a break with the Protestant church music tradition and by intent a mere imitation of secular trends. The music, which emerged primarily as religious propaganda, lacked a religious or even a cultural home.

Popular music in the United States, as elsewhere, has always been created through a process of musical and cultural fusion (Schafer 8 and 21). Artists from diverse popular and folk music traditions have synthesized musical and thematic elements and borrowed conventions of performance and instrumentation from each other. Rock music was a mixture of country, rhythm-and-blues, ethnic folk music, traditional gospel, and the commercial pop of New York’s Tin Pan Alley. An important dynamic in the creative process of American popular music was the interplay between black and white religious and secular traditions. Gospel and secular traditions were virtually inseparable musically. Black gospel and blues were so closely related- both had roots in the Negro spirituals and work songs-that gospel singer Willie Mae Ford Smith said: “The gospel song is the Christian blues” (Heilbut 188). A parallel tradition of religious music existed in the folk hymns and revival spirituals of Anglo-Americans and it is indisputable that racial lines were crossed in their concurrent development.

Differences between sacred and secular music were actually more cultural than artistic. The music served different functions in the life of a community and were identified by thematic content, purpose, and physical location-the church as opposed to the dance club, for instance. Also, particular artists were identified with either the sacred or secular camp. Although there were some exceptions,

82 crossing over from one camp to the other, one writer noted, amounted “to a serious transgression, if not to a betrayal” (Kingman 170). After gospel singer Sam Cooke embarked on a career in soul music, for instance, black audiences would not accept him afterwards in a religious setting. Attempting to make a comeback in gospel music, Cooke appeared on stage with his former gospel quartet, the Soul Stirrers. The audience was outraged. Someone yelled: “Get that blues singer down.. .This is a Christian program” (Heilbut 90).

Commercial gospel recordings emerged in the early twentieth century as a fusion of gospel songs (previously called “evangelistic songs”), country and western, and black spirituals. Thomas A. Dorsey is generally credited with coining the term “gospel music.” Dorsey was a Georgia blues singer who began composing religious songs in popular styles after his own religious conversion in the 1920s. He considered his gospel compositions the “sacred counterpart” to blues (Kingman 169).

Black gospel flourished in the period between 1940 and 1950 inspired by compositions by Dorsey and more than a dozen other prolific songwriters. One observer from “outside the church” described the scene at a Mahalia Jackson concert, or “service,” in 1959.

Journal of American Culture ment; immediate rapport between performer and audience, sharing a body of eccentric assumptions- is yet unrealized at the Electric Circus and already vitiated at the Fillmore but exists in any Negro Holiness Church” (Hobson 17-30).4

Some of the most expressive forms of popular music were forged in the controversial heat of sacred and secular cultures mixing together. Much of the intense passion in the rock’n’roll of Jerry Lee Lewis, for example, came from a personal conflict between his Southern Pentecostal upbringing and his headlong thrust into what he called “worldly music, rock ’n’ roll” (Ward, Stokes and Tucker 147). When Ray Charles modified revered black gospel songs to suit a secular R&B style, it was considered an act of apostasy. Reflecting the opinion of many, one gospel singer said that blending gospel with popular styles was like “exchanging a diamond for a marble” (Hobson 20). The musical hybrid Charles created, however, became a powerful expression of the Afro-American concept of “soul.” Soul united religious ideals and secular realities. The music was ignited by sassy sounds and double entendre metaphors that symbolically infused the secular concerns of blacks during the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s with the jubilation and triumph of gospel. Aretha Franklin’s call for “R- E-S-P-E-C-T” in 1967 had as much to do with the politics of Black Power as i t did with man-woman relationships, although white middle-class listeners may not have heard it that way.

Both rock ’n’ roll and soul fused musical and cultural elements to form hybrids that became symbolic expressions of the values, outlook, and lifestyle of different subcultures. This was true of their musical style as well as their lyrical content. Contemporary Christian music, however, was not a new musical hybrid but merely a co-optation of existing rock music for evangelistic purposes. People in the gospel music industry at large, executives and artists alike, treated music as a neutral, universal language. They increasingly believed that any style, regardless of cultural roots or commercial basis, could be adapted as a vehicle for Christian themes. Gospel Music Association (GMA) executive director Don Butler said: “There is no such thing as gospel ‘music’-the lyrics are what make songs religious or secular” (Millard 152). Sparrow Records founder Billy Ray Hearn was adamant: “Contemporary Christian music has nothing to do with the musical style. It has only to do with the lyrics” (Medearis D 9A). HIS magazine, a monthly publication by an evangelical campus ministry, Intervarsity Christian Fellow- ship, asked several CCM artists if there was anything

The effect is something for which my rather Puritanical New England background never prepared me. Gentle old ladies on all sides start to “flip” like popcorn over a hot stove. Directly in front, an angular woman springs to her feet, raised her arms rigidly on high, and dances down the aisle shouting “Sweet Jesus!” (Boyer 8)

Jackson, Georgia Peach and a number of quartets belted out songs that made gospel, according to one writer, “the most important black musical form since jazz” (Heilbut xxix). Gospel was still largely associated with black religious music, although Southern gospel quartets had popularized some white gospel songs with “barbershop harmony.” The verse-and-chorus form of Southern gospel music showed the influence of the commercial pop songs of Tin Pan Alley, which were also written for the white mainstream market at the time.

Black gospel had an enormous impact on American popular music. A host of professional black artists received their training in the church before moving into the entertainment world. Mainstream folk and rock artists, from Bob Dylan to the psychedelic rock groups, were also influenced by black gospel. Beyond utilizing musical elements, secular performers tried to adapt the cultural context of gospel to the rock arena. One writer argued that “everything they attempt-total musical environ-

American Evangelicals and Rock Music other than the lyrics that made their music “Christian. ” All agreed that lyrical content was the distinguishing feature of contemporary Christian music; the music itself was simply a framework for the message contained in the lyrics. “My music is not gospel music by the strict definition,” one CCM artist explained. “It’s contemporary music with a Christian message. If you took the lyrics away and changed them to a secular message, I don’t think you would be able to tell the music apart from pop, contemporary, rock-oriented music” (“God, Me & My Guitar” 18). In the contemporary gospel industry, musical style was largely abandoned to secular innovation; imitation of commercially successful styles, along with “religious” lyrics, became the basis of evangelical music-making.5 Consequently, while other musical subcultures, including punk, reggae, and rap, enlivened mainstream music with new ideas and musical innovations, CCM had little impact on other music. It was merely a musical chameleon, adapting various existing styles from other commercial music producers.

In fact, i t is most accurate to say that because evangelical rockers naively imitated trends in popular music, secular rock had an enormous impact on CCM. To the confusion of many in the church (and the mainstream music industry as well), CCM artists seemed to be creating religiously sanitized versions of secular cultural expressions. The CCM industry either ignored or was unaware of the cultural contexts of the music i t took from secular artists and mainstream commercial music. “In their efforts to weed out the devil’s influence from pop music,” one writer rightly observed, “Christian musicians tended to create a curiously rootless sort of music. ” Although evangelical popular music now had a religious corollary to every secular style, “much of it simply made mellow Muzak unto the Lord by sanitizing various secular styles. There were rock songs without the romance and the rebellion, and there were torch songs without the flame” (Flake 182 and 183). CCM became a popular expression of so many disparate musical styles that it lacked a religious or even a cultural home.

83 eighties’ metal bands in both appearance and musical performance. They wore vampy makeup, spiked hair, and tight leather-and-spandex outfits with yellow and black stripes. Their music was loud, raucous metal with lyrics that supposedly testified to their religious faith. Members of the band threw Bibles into the audience at concerts and were extremely outspoken about their motivations. “We are rock ’n’ roll evangelists,” said one member of the band. “Stryper is a modern-day John the Baptist crying in the world of rock for those who don’t have the life of Christ to turn on the light switch. Our message is J-E-S-U-S” (Clarke 60). Some evangelicals were not sure. One writer insightfully argued that as a communication process evangelical rock sent conflicting messages. CCM groups, he explained, were “on stage wearing eye make-up and with shirts split open to their navels and with pelvises grinding to a ‘heavy metal’ sound; and they tell teenaged boys who may be struggling with gender confusion how God can fulfill their masculinity, or try to convince teenaged girls that they must cap their sexual urges until they are married” (Hazard 40).

Given such mixed signals, many evangelicals concluded that there was little difference between CCM and secular rock. Contemporary Christian rock was condemned by Pentecostals and funda- mentalists who thought rock music was inherently evil and irredeemable for evangelical ministry. These critics labeled evangelical versions of rock music “spiritual fornication” (“Can Religion Rock?” 21). Led by writers Bob Larson, David Noebel, and televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, anti- rock crusaders used pulpits and publications to denounce rock music as demon-inspired, a communist conspiracy, and devastating to the intellectual and moral development of youth.6 “Unfortunately, the noise that millions of our youth call music is analogous to the story tape played backwards,” wrote Noebel, the president of Summit Ministries, an interdenominational youth training center. “It is invigorating, vulgarizing and orgiastic. It is destroying our youth’s ability to relax, reflect, study, pray, and even meditate, and is in fact preparing them for riot, civil disobedience and revolution” (5). Evangelical rock was not free from these attacks. “I feel that this music is wrong; it does not glorify God,” said Swaggart. “In some cases, I would go so far as to say that I believe it is of Satanic origin” (Sty11 5). CCM artists and executives continued to argue for the neutrality of musical style as a defense against assertions that the beat of rock was inherently evil.7 At the same time, they welcomed criticism that portrayed the

Music From God or Satan? The lack of concern about the fusion of

disparate styles and lyrics in contemporary Christian music resulted in the birth of several Janus-headed creations. One of the most extreme expressions of evangelical rock was a west coast Heavy Metal group called Stryper. These “Heavenly Metal” missionaries were evangelical clones of

84 evils of secular rock music. The contemporary gospel music industry had much to gain by encouraging evangelical record buyers to forsake secular recordings and purchase their Christianized versions instead.

Despite harsh criticism, a slice of the evangelical market accepted the idea that musical style did not matter; i t was the lyrics that made the music “Christian.” The result, however, was not exactly what gospel industry people anticipated. Although this understanding of popular art blended diverse taste groups among evangelicals on the basis of the lyrics, i t ripped religious popular music from the tradition and cultural life of the church. Traditional roles for church music-worship, praise, confession, and evangelism-were mixed with non-ecclesiastical functions for popular music, like dancing, diversion, exercising, and entertain- ment. Also, the more popular CCM artists were reluctant to perform in churches, traditionally the setting for religious music. Church sanctuaries often had poor acoustics, and church “gigs” sometimes created a stigma for an evangelical artist who wanted to reach non-believers or succeed in the mainstream market. The most visible CCM concerts were often held in the same venues that hosted secular rock groups. The lines between the two became increasingly ambiguous, even for evangelicals who supported the CCM industry.

As tensions within the evangelical community mounted over CCM, several problems with this co- optation of contemporary music for propagation of the evangelical faith became evident. Contrary to the beliefs of those in the contemporary gospel music business, musical style is not neutral. Rock music, as well as other styles CCM artists adopted, was organically wed to the socio-cultural setting in which the music was created and developed. Rock, for example, emerged as a kind of musical language for the baby boom generation, capturing and shaping the dreams, fantasies, and fears of American adolescents beginning in the post-World War I1 period. As a mixture of American popular and folk music, rock blossomed in the soil of the 1950s and 1960s when disillusioned youth struggled with the ideals of democracy in light of racial injustice and the perceived immorality of the Vietnam War. The music’s meaning and power derived in large part from its cultural setting (Kingman 219).

Also, the unprecedented size of the baby boom generation and the post-World War I1 affluence created a consumer-oriented youth culture that for the first time cut across social and economic classes and existed on a national scale. Commercial

Journal of American Culture products were targeted at the young baby boom demographic-everything from blemish cream to movies-and rock music was a staple in the postwar youth culture’s consumer diet. By adopting both rock music and the ethos of the entertainment business, CCM thrust evangelical youth into the new consumer-oriented youth culture, or at least into an evangelical version of it.

In addition, the CCM industry had naively assumed that rock music was effective evangelis- tically. In an evaluation of popular music as political propaganda, sociologist R. Serge Denisoff demonstrated that the Top 40 did prove an excellent medium for exposure for protest or topical songs, especially among listeners under thirty. The commercialization required to make a Top 40 hit, however, transformed propaganda into rather bland entertainment (149-167; Desmond 276-284; and DeCurtis 11). A CCM song about the eternal love of Jesus lost its spiritual import in the company of “Simply Irresistible,” “I Want Your Sex,” and a commercial for “Home of the Whopper.”

Consequently, while the original intent of CCM was to use existing rock music to evangelize lost youth, the whole CCM enterprise quickly became relegated to the small evangelical subculture. As early as 1971 there were reports that Jesus-rock concerts were already becoming gatherings for believers and not evangelistic crusades (Eggebroten 38). This continued to be the case throughout the 1980s. The audience for contemporary Christian entertainment rapidly became 12 to 35-year-old evangelicals, not the “unsaved youth” for whom the music was allegedly written. Most popular culture theorists agreed that popularity (though to a degree a mystery) is determined at least partly by how well a popular artifact affirms people’s existing values and beliefs. To be successful in the general market, popular music must capture broader myths than those of a particular religious group.* In effect, then, popular music converted religious subcultures in the United States and not the other way around, as the CCM industry would discover when gospel artists tried to score on the mainstream pop charts in the mid-1980s.

Music To Liue By Although the evangelical popular music

industry sometimes functioned (with much confusion) somewhat like a church, its social and cultural model was primarily that of the entertainment industry. Popular entertainment exists and thrives in synergism with the American leisure culture. Young people spend much of their

American Evangelicals and Rock Music 85 institutional church leaders. In a sense, CCM artists acted like national youth ministers, composing songs to help young evangelicals navigate through the rough waters of adolescence and young adulthood. One popular evangelical recording artist even wrote a book to help teenagers overcome their problem’s (Smith with Ridenour).

However, in spite of its religious lyrics, CCM rarely offered stable and enduring solutions to the teen audience. Its maps were, like most popular art, transitory and emotional, not long-lasting and rational. Struggles with self and religious identity, sexual intimacy, and conformity were etherealized in most CCM songs, wrapped in the rhetoric of “follow Jesus” and “keep your eyes on the Lord.” The sterile clichks (“I’m not doing it!”) and redundant themes of contemporary Christian music were not only unappealing to those in the secular market, but apparently offered little help to most young evangelicals. Surveys showed there was little difference between the lifestyles of evangelical young people and their unchurched peers (Bezilla; McDowell Ministry; Brown and Hendee 1659-63).

free time and money going to movies and concerts, watching television, renting videos, listetling to the radio or recorded music they purchase, and dancing at clubs. The products of the entertainment industry serve a variety of beneficial functions in the audience, such as status symbols, investment, hobby, diversion, and entertainment. A major role, especially among youth, is the communicative function of popular art as an ongoing source of “maps of reality” (Schultze, et al.). Just as a map is not the territory but an abstract representation of the terrain, so popular artifacts are allusive descriptions of the cultural landscape, providing symbols and metaphors for making sense of life. Mapping reality refers to the construction of meanings, values, assumptions, attitudes, behavior- al norms, and social and gender roles. People not only find help with personal dilemmas but are influenced by portrayals of gender roles, social issues, political events, and metaphysical questions treated in movies, songs, or television programs.

This particular function of popular music, to the near exclusion of others, was the primary aim of those in the contemporary Christian music industry. In fact, that was the justification for adopting popular music styles-to communicate the evangelical message in a popular medium. One gospel record company’s slogan was, “Music to Live By.” In one sense, contemporary Christian music reaffirmed the evangelical faith of young believers, if only on a very simplistic level. Evangelical rock also fulfilled separatist desires as a safe religious alternative to the vulgarity and rebelliousness of much rock music. At the same time, as an imitation of contemporary secular music and fashion, CCM bolstered the identity of young evangelicals who feared being alienated from their peers because of their religious faith. Born-again rock was as “cool” as its secular counterpart, except the words were about Christian living. Perhaps more than anything else, by its incessant promotion of media consumption the CCM industry subtly affirmed American materialism as a guide to personal happiness. Evangelical records and videos of ten were advertised as solutions to family problems, parent-child conflicts, and adolescent struggles.

In many ways, then, the CCM industry usurped the role and many of the functions of the institutional church. One CCM spokesperson even referred to the contemporary Christian music industry-musicians, disc jockeys, and fans included-as the body of Christ (Baker 162). T o many young evangelicals, the CCM industry, and especially high-profile artists, often seemed more in touch with the issues of their lives than

CCM in a Three-Ring Circus The rapprochement of the evangelical para-

digm and the cultural forces that drove the secular recording industry created confusion in the CCM industry. Disparate motives and strategies resulted in an internal circuity and extreme lack of co- operation throughout. This could be the main reason the CCM industry reached a plateau in the late 1980s in terms of musical development, product sales, and market exposure.

The synthesis of evangelism and marketing eventually led to the gospel industry’s own co- optation by the mainstream recording business. This comes as no surprise for i t had a precedent in rock music, which also embodied an inherent tension in the ideology it conveyed. On the one hand, rock music was a cultural expression of a new vision for democratic ideals in reaction against the dehumanization of our technological society and the evil effects of capitalism. On the other hand, rock was a popular music form that relied on technology for its sound and reproduction and on the “establishment’s” commercial method of dissemination. The ideological power of rock music was proportionate to its popularity, which was measured by the number of units sold and its success on the trade charts (Frith; Hirst; Roszak). The industrial co-optation of rock should have served as a warning to gospel industry people.

86 In the end, contemporary Christian music had

little to offer the mainstream of American popular music other than its message of salvation in Christ. But that message went largely unheard in the three- ring circus of the entertainment industry. Instead CCM attracted considerable attention as a seemingly strange and often confusing synthesis of sacred and secular ideals and sensibilities in American culture. One writer called CCM “the most peculiar hybrid of all in Christian culture” (Flake 22).

Journal of American Culture become an excellent alternative.” Of course, this was a comparison of musical style and not lifestyle. Baker pointed out that “a reference to Culture Club does not infer that the Christian counterpart dresses in women’s clothes or wears lipstick and eye shadow.” When the chart first appeared in the September 1982 issue of Group magazine, an evangelical youth publication, Baker was flooded with letters from youth pastors and music ministers requesting reprint permission (Baker 240).

6Among the anti-rock publication are Bob Larson, Rock & the Church (Carol Stream, Illinois: Creation House, 1971) and Rock: For Those Who Listen to the Words and Don’t Like What They Hear (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.; Living Books, 1982); David Wilkerson, Set the Trumpet to Thy Mouth (Lindale, Texas: World Challenge, Inc., 1985); Dan Peters and Steve Peters with Cher Merrill, Why Knock Rock? (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1984).

?For a defense of contemporary Christian music see Dana Key with Steve Rabey, Don’t Stop the M w i c (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1989); Steve Lawhead, Rock of This Age: The Real & Imagined Dangers of Rock Music (Downers Grove, Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1987; Dan Peters and Steve Peters with Cher Merrill, What About Christian Rock (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1986). In an attempt to provide “a comprehensive apologetic for Christian rock music,’’ CCM magazine ran a three-part series that outlined the controversy among Christians over the synthesis of secular rock with religious lyrics. See “Does Rock’n’Roll Lead to Rack’n’Run?” Contemporary Christian Music, August/September 1981, 15- 17; “Can Religions Rock?” Contemporary Christian Music, October 1981, 20-23; “Our God, the Star, or Electric Guitar: Who does Christian Rock Glorify?” Contemporary Christian Music, November 1981, 18-20.

BAS evidence of this, a number of musicians already successful in the mainstream market saw their popularity dwindle when they began writing songs confessing their newfound evangelical faith. Apparently, the general public did not wish to hear the evangelical catechism set to the tune of a rock song. Some of these artists left the mainstream and signed with gospel labels. Others, most notably Bob Dylan, continued in the general market despite hostile criticism and disappointing album sales.

Notes

’The specific features of historic evangelicalism are: 1) the Reformation doctrine of final authority of Scripture over tradition, ecclesiastical power, or any other cultural manifestation of the eternal “truths” of Scripture; this clearly distinguishes evangelical Protestantism from Roman Catholicism; 2) the real, historic character of God’s saving work, namely that the events in God’s plan of redemption actually took place in natural history; 3) eternal salvation only through personal faith in Christ; 4) the importance of evangelism and missions; and 5) the importance of a spiritually transformed life (Marsden, Evangelicalism, ix-x)

‘The Jesus Movement was a part of the major religious phenomenon in America identified as “neo-evangelicalism,” a combination of the biblical orthodoxy of fundamentalism and the cultural calling of evangelicalism to evangelize and serve as the moral guardians of American culture. Near the end of the 196Os, neo-evangelicalism emerged as a distinct transdenominational movement and became the “mainline” religion of the 1970s, embodying an array of denominational churches and parachurch organizations, including black evangelical churches and nondenominational campus and youth ministries (Marsden, Reforming, 1-1 1; Sweet, 29-45).

3For a fuller discussion of Christian worldviews see Wolters, and Niebuhr.

‘The list of Black artists who went from church choirs to popular entertainment was endless: Ray Charles, Clyde McPhatter, Aretha Franklin, Ike and Tina Turner, Melba Moore, Dionne Warwick, Roberta Flack, Wilson Pickett, the late Marvin Gaye, the late Sam Cooke, and in the late 1980s, Whitney Houston.

5Paul Baker’s “Music Comparison Chart” aptly illustrates the CCM aesthetic. The chart was a Christian consumer guide listing contemporary Christian musicians and their secular music parallel. In a telephone interview, 22 December 1989, Baker said he conceived the comparison chart as an “entre point for people unfamiliar with Christian music.” If a Christian enjoyed a certain “secular” artist, there was an evangelical counterpart who sounded the same, but sang about Christian themes. “Contemporary Christian music has grown so much, that no matter what the style of music, there is probably a Christian artist somewhere performing it,” Baker explained. “With quantity and quality constantly increasing, contemporary Christian music has

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