(Image source: Alamy Stock Images)
The following excerpt comes from God Gave Rock and Roll to You by Leah Payne. (Copyright © 2024 by Leah Payne and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.) The book explores the history of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and what that industry reveals about white evangelical culture in the United States.
This excerpt comes from the book’s introduction, “CCM and the Industry of American Evangelicalism.”
***
Fourteen-year-old David Shields was nervous. Really nervous. It was 2005, and his death- metal band Skull Crushers was about to play a big show in Lexington, Nebraska. The Skull Crushers may not sound like an unusual name for a death- metal band, and perhaps it is not. But what made it somewhat unusual was that it was inspired by a passage in the Bible: Romans 16:20 — “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet.” Skull Crushers aimed to crush the heck out of the Devil that night. Their tools were biblically based lyrics screamed over distorted guitars. The band, booked by David’s cool, skater youth pastor, played in the youth building of a Southern Baptist Church pastored by David’s dad. “We were absolutely horrible,” David recalled years later, but the small crowd of teenaged evangelicals cheered for more.
Southern Baptist churches of the 2000s were not widely known for being death-metal taste makers, but David and his bandmates did not see their work as metal, per se. Through the power of music, they were spreading the gospel. In a performance that was part rock concert, part religious revival, the Skull Crushers aimed to entertain and to bring the audience to Christ. “Our yelling unintelligible lyrics was suddenly holy work,” he remembered, “because the lyrics were ‘Christian.’”
David and the Skull Crushers were not unique. They were among thousands of bands and artists who, in the second half of the twentieth century, performed on sanctuary stages, in youth rooms and church basements, and at music festivals, denominational meetings, colleges, coffee shops, and camps around the nation. These performers — along with record- company executives, publicists, booking agents, radio DJs, journalists, and many more — were part of the thriving industry of Contemporary Christian Music, commonly called CCM. CCM encompassed many genres and often sounded like mainstream music, but what made it distinctive is that it was created by and for, and sold almost exclusively to, white evangelicals. Consumed by millions, CCM was the soundtrack of evangelical conversions, worship, adolescence, marriage, child-rearing, and activism. Few church services, youth all-nighters, sporting events, holiday gatherings, or political protests were complete without CCM accompaniment.
By the time the Skull Crushers took the stage, CCM was in a precarious position. Once an almost billion-dollar industry with culture-shaping power, by the early aughts the genre was in decline. This book analyzes Contemporary Christian Music as an industry born from early twentieth-century Southern white revivalist hymn- singing networks, stoked by 1960s and 1970s baby- boomer converts on the West Coast, and fueled in the late twentieth century by a vast network of evangelical media makers and marketers, booksellers, denominations, congregations, parachurch organizations, educational institutions, lobbying organizations, and advocacy groups. As Contemporary Christian Music grew, enterprising conservative white Protestants recognized that songs of revival were (and are) powerful, portable vehicles for ideology. The following pages trace how CCM produced music that served as a sonic shorthand for white evangelical orthodoxy and social action, prized for its capacity to disseminate evangelical messages about what it means to be Christian and American.
CCM songs often reflected — and drove — evangelical conversations about pressing social and political concerns like abortion, prayer in public schools, or teen abstinence. At the turn of the twenty- first century, however, Contemporary Christian Music was undermined by many of the market forces and cultural norms that built it. Even though the industry declined precipitously in the 2000s, however, the theological visions and political ambitions of CCM’s leading music makers, and the media networks that connect them, continue to shape evangelicalism in the United States and abroad.
Contemporary Christian Music served adults and young children, to be sure, but the industry’s core customers were suburban, middle-class, white American adolescents. CCM marketers were certainly not alone in recognizing the buying power of American teens, but evangelicals became convinced that teens were in a particularly precarious spiritual state, which meant that CCM sales had cosmic importance. For evangelical caregivers, the teen years were a must-win battlefield in the war for the future of the Christian faith, the nation, and even the world. Mass media, they reckoned, was an effective weapon to be employed in that fight, and they set out to save young souls and shape the nation through music.
It is hard to overstate the power of CCM, and its ubiquity in late twentieth-century evangelical life. As the ambient sound of white evangelicalism, it felt inescapable. It certainly was for me, growing up in the 1990s as a Pentecostal pastor’s kid in a working-class town in rural Oregon. My father had no love for CCM; he thought the quality of the music was poor, and he did not play it in my childhood home. And, as a family, we did not have the means to participate in the middle-class, suburban consumption patterns of CCM — the concerts, festivals, albums, t-shirts, and other merchandise. But many young people around me were immersed in the world of youth groups and Christian music festivals, and almost everyone I knew had either heard an Amy Grant song or performed a live-action version of a Carman hit.
In college, I was introduced to revivalist hymnody by Derric Johnson, a conductor, vocal arranger, and creator of a vocal ensemble that laid the foundation of what would become CCM. Derric and his spouse, vocalist Debbie Johnson, expanded my understanding of sacred music beyond the boundaries of the Pentecostal praise and worship tunes of my upbringing. He taught me to appreciate and recognize West Coast pop and jazz harmonies, along with Black Gospel and Southern Gospel standards.
After I graduated, I married an aspiring CCM artist and moved to Nashville, Tennessee, in 2001, when CCM was at its pinnacle in terms of prosperity and cultural influence. As a new Nashvillian, I found myself doing what a lot of my peers with humanities degrees did: working at a coffee shop. Two of my favorite customers were Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth, who I knew only as fellow West Coast transplants. I discovered eventually that Charlie was an award-winning singer-songwriter, jazz artist, pianist, producer, and record-label executive, who had also written a book about CCM. Charlie ended up offering me a job as his assistant, and I worked at Charlie and Andi’s legendary Art House studio for several years.
I did not understand, as a 21-year-old barista, the scope of Charlie’s influence and work. Nor did I grasp in the early 2000s that I was bearing witness to a transformative moment in the music industry in general, and CCM in particular. Eventually, I went to graduate school at Vanderbilt Divinity School, became a religious historian, and thought that my short, youthful stint in CCM was over.
As I studied American religion, however, my perspective on CCM began to change. I began to regard Contemporary Christian Music performances as more than quirky evangelical entertainment. Instead, I came to see CCM concerts as sites where power is created and negotiated. At CCM performances, entertainers exerted influence over attendees by soliciting public conversions, stoking political action, and seeking donations for social causes.
In these performances, bestselling CCM stars and their audiences also performed and enforced strict evangelical ideals about gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. Women who could and would be “womanly” according to straight, white, middle-class evangelical ideals were adored. Men who could and would be “manly” according to straight, white middle-class evangelical norms were admired. Those who could not — or would not — adhere to such standards were often marginalized.
For many participants and observers, the trappings of CCM — the evangelical pop stars, interpretive dancers, puppeteers, mimes, and bodybuilders — are silly expressions of kitsch or an embarrassing remnant of an evangelical past. Silly things, however, can be deadly serious to devoted fans — just ask anyone who has angered online fans of Beyonce or Taylor Swift. CCM had the capacity to be both.
The question that guides my work is: What can one learn about the development of evangelicalism by looking at CCM, one of the largest, most profitable forms of mass media produced in the twentieth century? CCM charts are a representative of a conversation among (predominantly, but not exclusively white) evangelicals about what kind of people they wanted to be, what sort of world they wanted to create, what kind of actions they thought would honor God.
To listen to that conversation, I analyzed the music of twentieth- century songbooks and early recordings and radio programs, tracked the top-selling CCM through the pages of Contemporary Christian Music Magazine and the Billboard Christian music charts, and listened carefully to the top twenty-five CCM albums from the late 1970s to 2023.
As the soundtrack of white evangelical culture, Contemporary Christian Music carried, in music and merchandise, decades of musical conversations about evangelical identity and ideology. Because it was produced mostly by white evangelical men, and marketed en masse to white evangelical mothers and youth pastors for consumption by white evangelical children, it is also a large- scale, multigenerational conversation about evangelical values in the United States. Conversations about what music ought to be made, who ought to make it, and what messages it should include reveal how white evangelicals aimed to raise their children to be ideal citizens of the kingdom of God, and of the United States.
Part business, part devotional activity, part religious instruction, the trajectory of CCM also shows how the marketplace and technological innovations shaped evangelical identity and ideology. The story of CCM is the story of how white evangelicals looked to the marketplace for signs of God’s work in the world. While there were always notable dissenters, for the most part those within the industry regarded profits as a sign of God’s blessing. The top-selling artists and entertainers, then, reflected 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.
In this way, the history of the CCM charts is a history of how consumers voiced their theological and political opinions unofficially through their buying practices. Year after year, white evangelical denominations and churches published official treatises and position papers and public statements, and all the while, the people who constituted these organizations purchased music that they came to believe represented true Christian life. CCM charts represented rank-and- ile white evangelical consensus about what sorts of people evangelicals believed could be credible messengers of the gospel. And the charts displayed what sorts of ideas about God, the world, and the people of God were bankable evangelical theologies. Sometimes these off- the- books ideas aligned with official denominational or congregational teaching; sometimes they did not. Through the market, consumers challenged — and in some cases overturned — the traditional, institutional authority of their pastors, congregations, or denominations.
Because many white evangelicals viewed CCM as a distillation of Christian orthodoxy, a purveyor of godly activism, and a form of Christian parenting, Contemporary Christian Music was (and is) a high-stakes industry. The territories of CCM were carefully guarded because the stakes are clear. For many, CCM was not primarily about entertainment or art; it was the business of salvation. The souls of all of those kids jumping up and down to the Skull Crushers in Nebraska, along with the souls of all the youth group kids in basements and church foyers around the country, were up for grabs – along with the soul of the nation itself.
Leah Payne is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Portland Seminary. She is the author of Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century and articles in the Washington Post, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today.
***
Interested in more on this topic? Check out episode 44 of the Revealer podcast: “Contemporary Christian Music’s Religious and Political Messages.”
