What Would Becky Buy?

Tom Zoellner considers Leah Payne’s “God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music.”

By Tom ZoellnerDecember 30, 2024

• History

• Philosophy & Religion

IT WOULD HAVE BEEN nearly impossible to have attended an evangelical megachurch in the 1990s without hearing “Awesome God,” a bright and sure-minded worship song that tore its way through sanctuary loudspeakers nationwide and made its lyricist, Rich Mullins, a famous man in Christian subculture.

But Mullins did not fit easily into the suburban family-oriented box of what was expected of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) stars. He instead lived his life like a wandering St. Jerome, giving most of his money away and avoiding the merchandising and touring expected of him. He even criticized the shallow theology of evangelicalism and the low quality of his own pat megahymn.

At the height of his fame, he moved to Tse Bonito, a small village on the New Mexico side of the Navajo Nation, to become a secondary school music teacher. He hid a drinking problem, and some suspected him of being gay. After he died in a 1997 traffic accident, one music executive disparaged him as a “a weirdo with one good song.” But another observed that he “probably understood grace better than all of us in the entire Christian thing.”

Mullins’s life is only one example of the tensions that lay underneath the genre of CCM, the multibillion-dollar business that preached a gospel of renouncing the world while embracing the same glitter-and-hype tools as the secular music world, packaging a message of nails, pain, and blood into a digestible vanilla bonbon.

CCM’s business model also rested on the same foundations as its secular counterpart—concerts, megastars, albums, and retail stores—and its demise at the hands of the internet created a similar fragmentation and rethinking of the art form itself. The music that backgrounded so much of megachurch culture in the last half century may well have been a mere pinprick on the 2,000-year longue durée of Christian music, an artifact of the late American Cold War period much as the Gregorian chant or the antiphon were the faith-based crazes of their own times.

The genre’s complicated arc comes under detailed scrutiny in the valuable history God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music (2024) by Leah Payne, a Pentecostal pastor’s kid who grew up on this music in rural Oregon, married an aspiring Christian musician, and moved to Nashville to help him pursue his career. She now takes a more clinical view as a professor of religious history at Portland Seminary in Oregon. In one of the very few academic—and autobiographical—phrases in this admirable book, she says she “came to see CCM concerts as sites where power is created and negotiated.”

Payne argues that uplifting and commercially successful songs like “Awesome God” helped evangelical churches fine-tune the message and the rhetorical key that would attract new members, creating a feedback loop of sorts. As she writes, “[T]he charts displayed what sorts of ideas about God, the world, and the people of God were bankable evangelical theologies.” The reliably cheerful soundtrack may have swelled the Sunday attendance numbers and reinforced a white suburban wholesomeness, but it ultimately left little room for the outcasts and holy fools like Rich Mullins who make up some of the truly prophetic figures in Christian history. The music’s stale conformity created a kind of bondage, the inverse of the ecstatic freedom that the lyrics promised.

Payne traces the roots of CCM to the altar calls, low liturgy, and shouting of the revival meetings and Holiness movements of the early 20th century, which led to the 1902 founding of the influential Pentecostal Union Mission Publishing Company in Nashville, Tennessee. Their songbooks popularized tunes like “Were You There?” that spoke of a particularly American brand of Muscular Christianity standing in the way of modernity.

Yet it had no problem employing the tools of modernity to spread the message. Radio preachers—–like Aimee Semple McPherson, broadcasting the Foursquare Gospel on Los Angeles’s KFSG, and Charles Fuller, whose syndicated Old Fashioned Revival Hour broadcast to 650 stations on the ABC network—spread a homogenized message that helped merge Pentecostal worship’s déclassé style with the liberation-flavored songs of the Black church and wrap it all in the kerygma of the First Baptist Church on the corner that emphasized probity and patriotism. Billy Graham’s Hour of Decision interspersed preaching with hand-over-heart songs like “God Bless America.”

The devil’s timpani of rock and roll that emerged in the 1950s, “with its songs of teenage love, fast cars, and ‘social dancing,’ was almost universally condemned in evangelical circles as ‘a menace to Christendom,’” writes Payne, even though its own origin in the thumping rhythm of the blues could be found in the music of the Black church and in the wail of Holiness revivals. “The same music we worship by, pray by, weep by, believe and rejoice by […] is being used by Dixieland jazz bands in the night clubs—used to get gain, entertain, deceive, defraud, and divide—to mock God,” complained youth pastor Bennie Triplett in 1957.

A few pastors decided it was better to co-opt the newcomer than to rail against it. The head of Focus on the Family, Dr. James Dobson, thought young men needed a certain amount of aggression to shed all their blossoming testosterone, and he cautiously allowed small doses of approved rock to be played in church youth groups. Though the tempo was redolent of sexual intercourse, the problem was not so much the speed of the drum time but the explicit rebellion against parents, country, and sobriety advocated in the lyrics. Secular rock delivered the real thing like a shot of whiskey. Could conservatives frame the square life as the true rebellion? And a bigger question loomed: should Christianity be a separate culture, or should it take over the mainstream?

Nobody could quite agree. Television producer Bob Briner argued that Christian artists should “‘effectively infiltrate’ mainstream culture with ‘the salt of the Gospel,’” while milk-smooth street preacher David Wilkerson targeted bored teenagers led away by “demonic pied pipers” of the rock-and-roll life. The entrepreneur J. Blanton Belk—misnamed in this book as “Frank Buchanan”—took a square-cut folk music show, Up with People, on the road, smuggling light religious thought into a Super Bowl half-time program. Costa Mesa’s Reverend Chuck Smith decided to look past the long hair and psychedelic style of the early counterculture and deem Jesus the “ultimate hippie” for his world-rejecting ways. Out of this movement came swoony ditties like “Since I Opened Up the Door” and “Welcome Back.”

Other offspring of the 1960s Bible-rock fusion were occasionally brilliant and sometimes clumsy. The hair metal band Stryper—named after Isaiah 53:5, “by His stripes we are healed”—dressed up in yellow-and-black spandex and tried to look like the true badasses against the authority of the fallen world. During the tour for their 1986 breakout album To Hell with the Devil, they tossed Bibles into the audience. Skeptics on all sides saw a patronizing attempt by fretting parents to lure in the young people with a hokey piece of bait. “Our yelling unintelligible lyrics was suddenly holy work […] because the lyrics were ‘Christian,’” remembered a member of death metal band Skull Crushers, who played a Southern Baptist church in Nebraska.

Here again, the central contradiction: how can the upright life be reconciled to rock and roll’s dark angst and carnal longings? “We can fill that void with something that’s pro-Christian, something that’s pro-moral, something that celebrates life,” insisted Scott Pelking, publicist for Word Records, a company that was itself conforming to the ways of the world by moving its headquarters to the glitz-and-grits capital of Nashville and embracing in its offerings “professionally crafted songwriting; smooth, string-based sounds; and tight background vocals.”

This content had a sizzling market. In the billion-dollar sales, many were inclined to see signs and wonders. Just as the sociologist Max Weber identified a psychological correlation between commercial success and the Calvinist sense of holiness in 1904, so too did the executives of Nashville Christian labels see evidence of divine favor in the profits, looking to individual album sales like stigmata on especially virtuous saints. “CCM marketers were certainly not alone in recognizing the buying power of American teens,” Payne writes, “but evangelicals became convinced that teens were in a particularly precarious spiritual state, which meant that CCM sales had cosmic importance.”

Payne surveys more than a century of American Christian pop culture and manages to cram an astonishing range of trends and players into a relatively slim volume. She is skilled at the art of transitional sentences (“Musicians were not the only ones to leave the CCM fold”) to keep the descriptive train on the tracks. This is high-quality prose that manages to sum up broad movements in compact phrases. It’s a major understudied topic with—other than Jesus Christ himself—no single main character to follow through the twists. The CCM chorus had thousands of human voices, so perhaps out of necessity for such an ambitious book, Payne sacrifices depth for breadth; she cannot linger. Major figures such as Amy Grant, the personally conflicted “Queen of Christian Pop,” are given just a few paragraphs without the focused attention they might otherwise deserve.

Grant checked every box in the CCM list of market demands: cheerful, pretty, white, and a member of the Nashville broadcast royalty, lucky enough to be born as the great-granddaughter of radio revival pioneer A. M. Burton, and willing to perform palate-pleasing songs that offered, in the words of a critic, “just an avuncular God, a steady beat and good lighting.” This meant, writes Payne, that “themes of suffering and death, while historically key to the Christian message, must be skipped or at least curtailed.” But beneath the surface Panglossianism and wide smile, Grant—a friend and defender of theological renegade Rich Mullins—struggled with evangelical teachings and was suffering in a marriage to a drug addict. Her 1998 divorce and remarriage hurt her career but did not destroy it.

Payne’s book is especially strong in describing the unique symbiotic machine that used to churn between Protestant megachurches, shopping mall Christian bookstores, and faith-based radio stations. Whichever songs proved popular in one venue invariably got juiced by the others. “Built to grow like big-box stores, megachurches often functioned as retail outlets for CCM merchandise and as venues for CCM concerts.” Browsers in Christian bookstores found a totalized market among all the ceramic figures, novels, aerobics videos, and Bible studies, while hearing the same songs they’d heard in Sunday church on the affiliate FM stations of K-LOVE, Salem Communications, or Air1. Programming executives joked that a song had to pass the JPM test—the mentions of “Jesus Per Minute,” a test that Amy Grant often failed.

All the consumerism created mountains of data, and executives soon began to talk of their prototypical record buyer as “Becky,” a mother of two who lived in the heartland. The evaluation of a new artist or song depended on whether Becky was going to go for it. “They knew what Becky drove, where she lived, her marital status, the size of her household, where she went on a special night out for dinner, and where she took her children to the drive thru,” writes Payne. The armies of minivan Beckys voted with their money, and in turn, the CCM industry gave them what they wanted: a hopeful message, a friendly Christ, and a message of sexual purity.

Payne could have spent more time describing this important feedback loop that made the artists captive to their audience because something crucial was left out of the CCM business model. If judging solely on the content of CCM music, a reader of the Gospels—whether believing or not—or a student of global church history might well conclude that the American evangelical movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries was an outlier and a passing theological fad on the level of the Taborite movement of the Middle Ages or the Arianism of the early church period. It left out the genuinely challenging aspects of the historic faith—the weird parts, the unearthly, the uncomfortable, the unexplainable, the empty tomb. The Nashville establishment may have also served as an inquisitions board to screen out the kind of creative heresies that lead to new ways of thinking about God. Would Martin Luther have gotten a record deal from these folks? Would Jesus himself?

Christian writer Rachel Held Evans put it this way: “Jesus taught us that when we throw a banquet or a party, our invitation list should include ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.’ So why do our church marketing teams target the young, the hip, the healthy, and the resourced?” The inconvenient bard Rich Mullins echoed this criticism of the music aimed at the “little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful house where you have no gays and minority groups anywhere near you.”

As CCM was reinforcing a particular type of exclusionary white suburban faith, it may also have been molding the structure of communal worship in those places into unexpected shapes. “The model of the rock star meant that any given worship leader could travel to any given location—a congregation, a theater, a stadium—and deliver a worship experience with or without a specific congregation or preacher or any other trappings of liturgy,” writes Payne. Just how much this singer-in-the-spotlight style—vulnerable as it is to narcissism—may have mutated the traditional community structure of church or decentered the theology would be extremely difficult to quantify and goes unexamined here.

Any historian of Christian music, from any era, must contend with the reality that one of the most important outcomes—the spiritual experience of the average listener—is going to be out of reach from the conventional tools of scholarship. Divine work cannot be quantified, and not even human testimony is a reliable dial. Much of the corpus of CCM may have been intellectually flat and artistically derivative, but did it genuinely transform souls along the way, no matter what its snooty critics might have thought? Payne does a good job in gleaning thoughts from ordinary fans via archival sources to get near this question. One of them, Bethany Erickson, grew up on Christian musical Cheez Whiz and thought it summed up the whole faith. Then she learned the tradition was much bigger and more varied. “My college roommate introduced me to Black Gospel music, and I found a genre that expressed suffering without resolution,” she said. Payne also quotes many listeners who defend CCM, those who found soul work in the lyrics and notes, and it would take a severe cynic to wave off their experiences.

Neither is this to say that all CCM was happy-clappy junk. Far from it: It produced a number of songs of both musical and theological depth. (“Mysterious Ways” by Kim Hill comes to mind.) It opened the door, if only halfway, to hip-hop and rap strains to those who might have otherwise rejected them. The genre may have observed the same three-minute formalism as Top 40 radio staples—hook, intro, chorus, bridge, solo, reprise—but formalism isn’t always a bad method for producing quality work. As Mullins himself once observed, music is nothing more than applied mathematics.

The internet and streaming services burned down and remade most aspects of American cultural production in the early part of the 21st century, and CCM did not escape the vengeance of technology. The debut of Apple iTunes in 2001 sparked a series of mergers, and within 10 years, only four big Christian record labels were left standing. As shopping malls went out of business, so did Christian bookstores. The old ways of retail were at death’s door. Becky was now in her fifties and out of the prime marketing demographic. Salem Communications started playing less CCM and more conservative political talk.

As more youth groups rejected CCM as dated and uncool, a more localized form of “worship music” took its place, played by house bands assembled in individual churches. They played songs longer than the three-minute CCM standards, interspersing them with spoken prayers or long instrumental solos, and found popular traction with Spotify and YouTube. By 2021, the guitar company Fender was selling one out of every three guitars to churches for their praise bands. Payne’s book could have gone into more detail on the house band revolution and illustrated its decentered business model, perhaps with a short profile that explained the break with CCM in clear terms.

The Nashville Christian sound of Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith is already becoming not just a nostalgia oldies product but also, perhaps, an organic American style that will one day be looked upon as representing an era or specific cultural geography, not unlike the way big band stands for 1940s nightclubs or Tin Pan Alley accompanies 1920s Manhattan. While it may have sounded like alien gibberish to those outside Christian circles, its influence ran deep. It paved the way for more hand-raising Pentecostal clout in nondenominational Bible churches, made worship more of a public spectacle, and broke down some of the doctrinal pony walls like infant baptism and predestination in favor of a one-pointed focus on Christ alone, however the listener was to understand him.

“I’ve come to learn that CCM is just a machine to gain as much money as possible by cranking out artists who can make money,” concluded Emmanuel Fernandez, who was raised in Bakersfield, California, in an Assembly of God church. “But there’s no denying the impact those bands I loved made in my life.”