‘God Gave Rock and Roll to You’: Tracing The Roots Of Contemporary Christian Rock

At its zenith in 2000, contemporary Christian music, “a genre created by, for, and sold almost exclusively to white evangelicals,” was worth close to $1 billion. It has sharply declined in the last quarter century.

The history of the soundtrack of American evangelical culture is profiled in the new book, “God Gave Rock & Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music” by Leah Payne, Associate Professor of American Religious History at Portland Seminary. Payne, as a Pentecostal pastor’s daughter in a working-class town in rural Oregon, grew up with this music and later married an aspiring CCM artist.

In the book, Payne traces the roots of CCM to the music of early 20th-century Southern Holiness and Pentecostal revival meetings. Later, revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson and evangelist Billy Graham incorporated Christian worship music into their services both in person, on radio and eventually television to reach mass audiences, especially as a way to communicate the evangelical gospel to younger generations. The advent of rock & roll in the 1950s was seen by adults as “the devil’s music,” with Pentecostals resenting Jerry Lee Lewis’s hit “Great Balls of Fire,” which for them is a description of the Holy Spirit, but he used it as an allusion to sex.

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In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Jesus freak/hippies, such as Larry Norman, fused rock with folk components using evangelical messages as lyrics, which could act as a wholesome alternative to lure teens away from secular mainstream pop stars. They set Pentecostal apocalyptic visions and conversion narratives to music.

These artists, along with evangelical media moguls, helped birth CCM, “part business, part devotional activity, part religious instruction.” Payne writes. “The story of CCM is the story of how white evangelicals looked to the marketplace for signs of God’s work in the world.”

Payne also details how CCM helped define femininity, gender roles, and sexual ethics, especially ‘purity’ culture (no sex before marriage for women) with the help of women mega-stars such as Amy Grant and Sandi Patty, since women were the industry’s biggest customers.

She interviewed historians, CCM artists, record executives, journalists, publishers, producers, as well as consulted archives, sales and marketing data, fan magazines and merchandise from the time to construct the relationship between Christian music and the making of white evangelical identity. Payne sent out a self-composed CCM survey on its impact on shaping their spiritual lives, with more than 1200 respondents from over a dozen countries participating.

Asked what inspired her to write her book, Payne replied, “I’m fascinated by unofficial, off-the-books forms of power and authority in religious communities. 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. But silly things can also be quite serious, and this book is an attempt to take the business of Contemporary Christian Music seriously. 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? I hope readers will learn a lot about how media, technology, and the marketplace shape the religious and political landscape in the USA and beyond.”

Payne said she sees the role that Pentecostals and Nazarenes played in shaping CCM as an industry as crucial.

“My book begins with the businesses that established and supported CCM, which were white Baptist, Nazarene, and Pentecostal songbook companies, Southern Gospel quartets, and early 20th century revival meetings. The music that they created and sold celebrated revivalist practices like altar calls, and included nostalgia, appropriations of Black Gospel music, patriotism, and plenty of apocalyptic anticipation,” she said.

Payne also observes that their music was meant to set Christians apart from a supposedly sinful outside world. “Nazarenes were holiness people, and their songbooks included music that encouraged personal holiness (refraining from gambling or drinking) and social holiness (banning the sale and manufacturing of alcohol). The issues holiness people addressed changed with the times, and reflected decades of evangelical social concerns. There were songs against alcohol and drugs, divorce, abortion, sexual activity outside of marriage, homosexuality, political correctness, mainstream music — anything evangelical parents feared would endanger their children and the future of the United States.”

Pentecostals were also major players in CCM, having written popular revival hymns in the early 20th century: “‘God Gave Rock and Roll to You’ explores how the sounds and sensibilities of African American congregations and Black and white Pentecostal and Holiness churches birthed rock and roll in the mid-20th century. In white evangelical communities, conversation about rock and roll was often inextricable from the national conversation about race, racism, and civil rights. White evangelical condemnations of rock music were often steeped in anti-Black racism. Pentecostal communities that created rock and roll, both Black and white, were often disturbed by the sounds of their Christian worship being used to celebrate things like sex or fast cars or dancing — things they thought were unholy, immoral, or spiritually dangerous.”

Payne coined a term — “Beckys” — to describe the suburban, white middle-class mothers who purchased CCM in Christian bookstores. Beckys were the core customers of CCM.

“They were not the core consumer, however — their children were. CCM’s profitable strategy was built on the idea that Beckys bought Christian music, intended to serve as ‘spiritual vitamins,’ to catechize their children in the evangelical faith. As the suburbs grew, the buying power of white middle-class women grew with them,” Payne said. “Beckys — real and imagined — exerted extraordinary influence over the CCM, but also over many other forms of evangelical media. Aiming to create and sustain Christian households, Beckys bought novels, instructional books, Bible studies, films, jewelry, t-shirts, and other forms of merchandise meant to enhance Christian faithfulness. Through their buying power, Beckys were some of the most influential, yet widely unacknowledged, gatekeepers of evangelical theology and practice in the 80s and 90s.”

Payne maintains that CCM helped evangelicals determine their identity.

“Many white evangelicals viewed CCM as a distillation of Christian orthodoxy, a purveyor of godly activism, and a form of Christian parenting,” she said. “Artists, entertainers, or bands that sold well … were those widely regarded as reliable representatives of evangelical orthodoxy and orthopraxy. In the book, I treat CCM charts as 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.”

Payne views CCM’s history by understanding consumers voicing their theological and political opinions through their buying practices. She added: “Over the decades, official white evangelical organizations published treatises, position papers, and public statements. While they did so, the people who constituted these organizations purchased music that they believed represented true Christian life. CCM charts represented rank-and-file 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.”

In this century, megachurches have dominated worship music, which has largely replaced CCM.

“One explanation is that popular, profitable modern worship music of the 20th is the music of the megachurch,” Payne noted. “Tightly-written pop songs and highly produced stadium rock performed by professional musicians before thousands of worshippers is the aspirational ideal for most evangelical worshippers, regardless of what kind of church they attend. Megachurches are the venues best suited to create stadium rock, and they often thrive in well-to-do suburban areas, so they have the most resources to create the sights and sounds that worshippers prefer. A tiny sanctuary without lighting and smoke machines can try to perform an Elevation Church or Maverick City song, but without the space and resources of the megachurch, their efforts will probably be underappreciated.”

This kind of worship music has led to the decline of CCM. Why? Payne cites many reasons.

“The internet, changing demographics, changing worship practices, and many, many more factors led to the decline of CCM and the rise of worship,” she said. “There’s a lively argument in industry circles about whether or not worship ascended to overtake CCM, or whether it’s what is left of the industry after the decline of CCM. ‘God Gave Rock and Roll’ parses out the complex relationship between the two industries, but I’ll mention one explanation here: CCM was largely domestic in its aim — a lot of the songs were patriotic, sought to uphold conservative values in the U.S., and celebrated American exceptionalism.”

The customer base of CCM is in precipitous decline. The Beckys are aging and not being replaced, demographically-speaking. The Christian bookstores which stocked CCM have closed, making it harder to access that music. Also medium-sized evangelical churches where aspiring CCM musicians could perform and perfect their artistry, hardly exist anymore.

“Worship music, by contrast, was, from the get-go, a transnational, multi-ethnic network of mostly charismatic and Pentecostal worshipping communities,” she said. “This makes it a business that can thrive in an increasingly global economy, and serve an increasingly diverse customer base.”

At the same time, Republican politicians have embraced CCM to promote conservative ideals and incite activism and now megachurch music. What role does politics play in Christian music today? While the industry has declined, high profile figures like Michael Tait of DC Talk or Michael W. Smith remain staunch supporters of Republican policies and politicians.

Since worship music usually includes less overt political messaging, some mistakenly conclude that it is immune to being utilized by activists. “God Gave Rock and Roll to You” shows how worship songs like “Waymaker” have enlivened Black Lives Matter protests and anti-vax demonstrations. While many worship leaders try to assume an apolitical posture during Christian worship, Sean Feucht, a worship-leader-turned-conservative-activist has made the act of charismatic praise and worship a site for political protest. The presence of worship music at the January 6 insurrection demonstrates that it is a welcome part of pro-Trump activism.”

Payne said that CCM teaches “that those who think they can harness the market for their own ends are often unprepared for the influence consumers and technological interventions have over commercialized religion. Through the marketplace, unofficial theologies and practices plus off-the-books rituals and material culture are just as powerful, perhaps even more powerful, than formal, official institutions.”

“God Gave Rock & Roll to You” provides an indispensable history on how CCM provided a potent source of power, meaning and political activism for evangelicals than any doctrine, denomination, culture war, or legislative agenda had done previously.