Memories emerged quickly when I began reading Dr. Payne’s outstanding book, God Gave Rock and Roll to You. As a teenager in Brazil, my native country, I was the bass player for Santo Sepulcro (Holy Sepulcher), a heavy metal Christian band – I even had long hair, if you can imagine. In Brazil, rock and roll had been closely associated with devil worship by Raúl Seixas, one of the most emblematic entertainers of his generation. Everyone knew the lyrics of one of Seixas’ most famous songs, released in 1975: “The devil is the father of rock; so it is very God rock; While Freud explains, it is the devil who shows us the way.” Santo Sepulcro band members had to remind folks more than once that the devil was a liar – God made all genres of music. So, at a very personal and practical level, I needed this book over 2 decades ago, and I am glad it is finally out.

When I migrated to the U.S., the first concert I attended featured the O.C. Supertones, with Switchfoot as an opening act, which was held at a church in Tampa, Florida, where I lived at the time. I remember vividly that the Switchfoot band members came down from the small stage and formed several prayer circles; I prayed with them. Sometime later, I attended a P.O.D. concert but in a very different venue. Their show was not at a church, and a lot more weed was being smoked. From Tampa, I sometimes drove to Night of Joy in Disney World – to watch Third Day, Pillar, Jeremy Camp, Rebbeca St. James, Superchick, and other usual suspects. In one Night of Joy concert, the crowd cheered loudly when Pillar’s lead singer announced that they were going on tour as an opening act to the band Evanescence, underscoring how lines between “worldly” and “Christian” music could be blurred. Of course, many of these artists made their way to the Global South, sometimes in the flesh, sometimes via other means. But they were there. When Stryper played “To Hell With The Devil” in São Paulo in 2013 or “Soldiers Under Command” in 2019, you would think they were a local band – everyone was singing along. When Michael W. Smith, who played in far-right gatherings in the U.S., such as the one organized by Franklin Graham in 2020 and helped lead worship in events that foreshadowed the January 6 insurrection, was in Brazil last August, he said that he “lost it and started crying” when 50,000 young Brazilians started singing his song “Agnus Dei” in Portuguese. American CCM songs were, and are, very popular among evangelicals abroad – including in Brazil. Yet, Brazilian genres, especially those rooted in Afro-diasporic rhythms such as samba, pagode, samba-reggae, or axé music, were never really accepted by Brazilian Protestants in the same way; they are still not accepted.

And I suppose that Stryper and Michael W. Smith – the “Ken Doll” of CCM, as Dr. Payne refers to him once, will be “Kenough” as paradigms for a couple of dynamics that I would like to pose as potential conversation starters. The Stryper paradigm concerns the potential edges of CCM – its categories of belonging and the potential discontinuities between 1) the aspirations evangelical youth ministers and White suburban moms had for CCM regarding its conceivable power for shaping evangelical teen identities, and 2) the daily functions of CCM. In the book, Dr. Payne mentions Stryper as a group whose belonging to CCM was questionable – something also true for other groups (such as some of the Tooth & Nail artists) whose aesthetics and relationships might have been perceived as too close to worldly performances. That sounds about right to me. Regarding the consumption of CCM by teenagers, Dr. Payne highlights, “Many teenagers in homes with a ‘CCM rule,’ wherein parents allowed only Christian music, rebelled privately or publicly and listened to the music of the mainstream” (110). But I wonder if Dr. Payne could say more about how youth ministers’ and parents’ aspirations for CCM were very commonly betrayed by teenagers, who might never have bought into the either/or frameworks imagined by their souls’ supposed managers. I wanted to hear a bit more about Dr. Payne’s take on the potential function of CCM on the lives of teenagers themselves, who might have consumed CCM as one aspect of a broader musical repertoire that included Stryper and Metallica, Supertones and No Doubt, Pillar and Offspring, Sandi Patty and Madonna. My sense, which bears a heavy burden of personal confession, is that teenagers were, to quote philosopher Britney Spears, not that innocent. When it came to teenagers’ daily lives, was the transgression of desired either/or frameworks the rule or the exception? In other words, how common was it for teenagers to pray with Switchfoot in a church one evening and smoke weed with the P.O.D. crowd another – while enjoying AC/DC simultaneously?

The Micheal W. Smith paradigm speaks more directly to the intersections of CCM and right-wing politics. Dr. Payne does a fantastic job of outlining the different iterations of the complex relationships between CCM songs and political ideology. Although I found myself googling turn of phrases – like, “Google, what does ‘to make pickles in a sea of cucumbers’ mean? (94) – Dr. Payne’s ability to make productive sense of a series of complex dynamics in this book deserves high praise. CCM artists, marketers, and listeners managed several concerns, from Jim Crow to the Civil Rights Movement to the Vietnam War (and many other wars waged by the “Land of the Free”) to the theopolitics and antics of your current Commander in Chief. Dr. Payne helps us understand how CCM shaped and was shaped by these and other era-shaping contexts and events. Micheal W. Smith stands out partially for how famous and involved in right-wing political events he has been. His example paves the way for conversations about the intersections between music, celebrity, money, evangelical ideological expansion, and theopolitical conservatism – which has profound transnational implications.

One relatively recent event that highlights this intersection transnationally is the event called “The Send,” which Dr. Payne mentions briefly in the book (198). I suspect Dr. Payne might say The Send’s soundtrack falls more squarely within the “worship” rubric, but its dynamics are reminiscent of CCM-featuring events. The first The Send event was in 2019 in Orlando, FL, but its main organizer, Lou Engle, said that The Send was initiated after a “conversation in 2011 with Youth with a Mission members who spoke about a new generation of Christian missionaries rising up following Rev. Billy Graham’s death.” And if Billy Graham had filled out stadiums with dictatorship-supporting evangelicals in Brazil since the 1960s, The Send Brazil’s worshipers were the loudest when ultraconservative president Jair Bolsonaro came on stage to greet them during the 2020 Brazilian version of the event – attended by 140,000 people and watched live by almost 2.5 million more. Presumably, people went to the three large soccer stadiums where the 12-h event was held to worship Jesus. Still, the excitement shown to their other “Messias” (Bolsonaro’s middle name actually means Messiah) was second to none. “I am here because I believe in Brazil,” Bolsonaro said, “and we are here because we believe in God.” He continued: “Brazil changed. Words that were once prohibited began to become commonplace: God, family, nation.”

Those like me, who were born under the dictatorship that ruled Brazil for 21 years, and many others who came before and know their history, hear explicit echoes of the language used to legitimize the establishment of the US-supported dictatorship in 1964. Evangelicals there to worship were presented with a seamless performance of music, preaching, and national mythmaking. The crowd cheered the most when Jair Bolsonaro – a Catholic baptized in the Jordan River by a Pentecostal pastor – said: “Two years ago (in the presidential elections), you were the inflection point, deciding to change Brazil’s destiny… The state might be secular, but Jair Bolsonaro is a Christian.” Music is a big draw to events such as The Send. Yet, attendees get much more than entertainment with a tingle – and if songs can transmit conservative messages and intentional dog whistles, the events facilitated by music do more than the songs themselves. I wonder if Dr. Payne could say a bit more about the multidirectional, transnational, historical connections between CCM legacies and contemporary theopolitics. What major general narratives and counternarratives about the role of CCM in conservative politics, and even anti-democratic actions, could be told?

Other paradigms could be suggested:

• - The Jennifer Knapp Paradigm: What happens when CCM artists come out of the closet and use their platform to engage exvangelicals and mainliners concerned with sexual and gender justice?

• - The Marcos Witt Paradigm: What histories of cross-pollination between Global South and Global North influences could be told?

And so on.

All of that to say that there is so much in this book, and as I have told Dr. Payne before, God Gave Rock and Roll to You is meticulously researched, thought-provoking, and beautifully written. Drawing on a rich tapestry of sources, the book masterfully navigates through the intricacies of the history of Contemporary Christian Music, highlighting its deep connections to broader culture and politics in the U.S. and beyond. This book offers a fascinating narrative indispensable for understanding U.S. evangelicalism and the history of 20th century United States writ large. I am grateful for this book – it got me thinking, and, for better or worse, it got me singing.

I enjoyed reading this book. That is not necessarily the case with all works of history. In some ways, the experience was reminiscent of reading Larry Eskridge’s God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (Oxford, 2013). In a past conversation with Payne, we discussed how sometimes in writing history, the comedy, or silliness, “writes itself.” This was perhaps the case for the opening vignette of Payne’s book, about a Southern Baptist death-metal band, the Skull Crushers, whose name was inspired by Romans 16:20 and the trampling of Satan. There is plenty more of this, over nearly 250 pages: an early 1970s Campus Crusade house band called Armageddon; the muscular Christianity of the Power Team, a group of body builders who demonstrated spiritual warfare in churches by ripping up phone books to the anthemic music of Christian rock band The Imperials’ “The Power of God”; and close-to-desperate attempts by the Christian industry to co-opt developments in secular music and fashion. Alongside such details, there are singers Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith as the “Barbie” and “Ken” dolls of evangelical Contemporary Christian Music, and a 1990s rap and rock trio DC Talk singing enthusiastically about not having sex.

This is all very good fun. However, one of the many laudable features of this fine academic study is that it manages to present what Payne calls the “seriousness and silliness” of Contemporary Christian Music. For any scholar, to allow human quirkiness or “silliness” (intentional and unintentional) to come through, while simultaneously treating the topic and subjects with the seriousness they deserve, can be a fine balance to strike. However, to do so (and to avoid the temptation of a dry historical narrative) is not only pleasing for the reader, but perhaps one of the surest signs that an author has succeeded in capturing the subculture about which they write, bringing it to authentic life. When an author succeeds in striking this balance, the result is something like God Gave Rock and Roll to You. This is a book that treats the actors behind the making, production, marketing, and business of CCM with sincerity and empathy. In her opening vignette, Payne also quotes one of the Skull Crushers talking about the act of performing their songs: “our yelling unintelligible lyrics suddenly became holy work” Exactly. The same is achieved in many other places, for example, in Payne’s analysis of the Jesus Music of the 1970s. The hippie performers, she understands, were convinced that they inhabited “a lively spiritual universe.” “The devil was not a metaphorical figure for most Jesus musicians,” she adds. Payne also brilliantly captures the intimacy and tenderness of the lyrics of the Jesus People songbook, a precursor for the Wimber-inspired worship of the decades to follow.

Payne’s study brings to the same kind of life the reception of Contemporary Christian Music. The book often provides windows into evangelicalism as lived religion. There is, for example, a discussion of the ritualised burning by Pentecostal youth groups of the “devil’s” music – AC/DC and the like – in the 1970s, as the “music of the Lord” replaced such records and tapes in their collections; an act which Payne compares to people bringing their sinful selves forward for baptism during a revivalist altar call (might it also, though, draw some comparison with the burning of fetishes in other Pentecostal contexts?). The stories drawn from interviewees demonstrate the ways in which Contemporary Christian Music mattered to its listeners: Christian metal fans who felt elation when spandex-wearing rockers Stryper made it to MTV’s top 10 request show; the high-school student who acted out the spiritual warfare epics of Carmen (the interviewee recalling “The other groups danced to songs about lollipops, and I was hunting the devil.”). These examples from testimony mean that Payne’s grand narrative simultaneously has human depth. This study takes evangelical “listenership” seriously, and in doing so makes a further contribution to the expanding literature on vernacular religion, soundscapes, and fandom. Although this use of human testimony is a strong feature of the book, perhaps more use could have been made of this material. Occasionally, the reader may still be left wondering how evangelicals were experiencing music. However, during her research, Payne created a survey of Contemporary Christian Music listeners, which had received over 1,200 responses by the date of publication. This is surely a goldmine for future research.

In God Gave Rock and Roll to You, music does not appear merely as an expression of evangelical culture. Rather, on one level, through business decisions, the shaping of imaginaries, and ritualised acts (which Payne presents as “strategic power relationships,” drawing on ritual theorist Catherine Bell) – and in its production, performance, and reception – the music is evangelicalism. The account is brisque and yet remarkably thorough. As a reviewer, it is difficult to find important developments which are missed, and one is left thinking it would be pedantic to do so. The book convincingly and authoritatively charts the rise of Contemporary Christian Music from its origins in revivalist songbook publishing in the 19th and early-20th centuries, through Cold War tensions and attempts by adults to harness music for young people, on to the Jesus People and charismatic emergences, to professionalisation and ever-expanding marketing niches and then finally towards contemporary developments such as “exvangelicalism” and MAGA evangelicalism. In Payne’s telling of the emergence and development of Contemporary Christian Music, the turning point seems to be the 1970s, when Jesus Music’s authentic expression of the emerging youth culture was cautiously embraced by many churches that had previously had their fundamentalist suspicions. This embrace came not only by charismatics, but also – with Billy Graham’s evangelical imprimatur at Explo’ 72 – straightlaced conservatives.

While this book is primarily a history of American evangelicalism, it has a careful eye for mapping transnational connections. An early example is the arrival from Liverpool of Crossbeats (a Christian version of the Beatles, who one evangelical journalist suggested, did “a much better job than the Archbishop of Canterbury” in reaching the younger generation). However, it emerges in Payne’s assessment that the actors who were primarily responsible for these transnational connections were charismatic and Pentecostal Christians. In the Americas, multi-directional networks mapped onto charismatic nodes in the United States, but also outside, including Canadian Merv and Merla’s charismatic Catacombs meeting in Toronto; and later Marcos Witt’s Centro de Capacitaciones y Dinámicas Musicales, Asociación Civil, in Durango, and the Baptist Lagoinha Church, in Belo Horizonte. Charismatic networks stretched beyond the Americas, for example, to the United Kingdom, which was by the 1990s producing artists such as Delirious? and Matt Redman, and Australian centres like the Hillsong megachurch in Sydney. Payne furthermore traces charismatic connectivities between the United States and places such as Ghana and Indonesia. Through analysis of the music industry, Payne shows, as I have also tried to demonstrate through mapping networks of charismatic leaders and service agencies in Age of the Spirit (Oxford), how global charismatic Christianity was increasingly integrated by the end of the twentieth century. This wider development was to have profound ramifications for Christians in these countries, including the United States.

Payne was uniquely qualified to write an authoritative and insightful account of Contemporary Christian Music in the United States. This book deserves to be read very widely.

My first, early encounter with Contemporary Christian Music came in the late 1970s in Monett, Missouri, a small town in the Ozarks. My uncle, a part-time music minister at the local Nazarene Church, had tastes that were just slightly less square, less insular than those of my parents. On one visit, Uncle Paul was playing the Imperials’ album Heed the Call (1979) on repeat. On the back of the record, the four singers appeared, strolling, and wearing the same three-piece suits and black, wide-collar shirts John Travolta had popularized as the official uniform of disco in Saturday Night Fever. Our favorite track on Heed the Call was a bouncy gospel song titled “Oh Buddha.” It was very much in the mode of the Oak Ridge Boys or the Statler Brothers, whose cassettes were in heavy rotation in our powder blue station wagon. “Oh Buddha” included the lyrics: “Well, Old Buddha was a man and I’m sure that he meant well/But I pray for his disciples lest they wind up in hell” and “No it won’t be old Buddha/That’s sitting on the throne/And it won’t be old Mohammed/That’s calling us home/And it won’t be Hare Krishna/That plays that trumpet tune/And we’re going to see the Son/Not Reverend Moon.”

Later in life, I realized something new about the meaning of those exclusionary lyrics. They are a kind of prebuttal to the Coexist bumper stickers so ubiquitous in the coming decades, and most often attached to the back of a Volvo or a Subaru. “Oh Buddha” drew a firm line between the unsaved and the saved, the damned and the eternally blessed. It also closely matched the many articles in evangelical magazines – Christianity Today, Moody Monthly, and the Pentecostal Evangel, among them – that lashed out against liberal Protestantism and ecumenical Christianity. A decade before “Oh Buddha” came out, James DeForest Murch warned readers of Moody Monthly about sinister forces in the churches. “Sunday School curricula and free literature distributed by the various departments and classes should be studied to determine whether they may contain liberal propaganda,” he cautioned, and “modern ecumenical schemes.” Churches needed “information concerning the dangers of communism, left-wing socialism, the councils of churches, the modern ecumenical drive, the new theology, the new morality, and all the other evils that beset the church.” (Murch, 32, 33) Such poisonous, supposedly open-minded material might call for a church investigating committee, Murch surmised.

Among other things, Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock and Roll to You adeptly helps make sense of the outlook and impact of evangelicalism, pentecostalism, and fundamentalism through pop music. She sheds light on the guarded world that the Imperials and James DeForest Murch inhabited. “The question that guides this book,” she writes, 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? 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.” (4) Payne charts the racial and political perspective of songs, artists, and labels, the conservative/heteronormative position on gender and sexuality, the theological orientation of the music, the critical influence of holiness and pentecostalism, and the fluctuating popularity of the genre. But the book is also much more than that.

The Imperials were at the top of their game in the Moral Majority years and had been around for well over a decade when they released the evangelical anthem “Oh Buddha.” In those years, they’d won Grammys as well as sung backup for Elvis on stage and in recording sessions. In 1985, a music journalist in Billboard summed up the group’s successful formula: “Few groups have managed to remain on the cutting edge of any kind of music over a period of 20 years or more. The Imperials have. The legendary group has seamlessly evolved from the premiere Southern gospel group in the business into an exciting, 80’s-styled rock band.” (Darden, 71) As a pimply, awkward teen who mostly listened to Oingo Boingo, Van Halen, Huey Lewis and the News, the Beatles, and Ozzy in 1985, I would have disputed that last part. But, the Imperials’ longevity, craftsmanship, and hit-making skills were undeniable. They proved as much with an unquestionable earworm of a song like “Trumpet of Jesus” (1980). “Oh Buddha” was the first hit song to rise to number one on the Contemporary, Inspirational, and Southern Gospel charts. By the Reagan years, the group was one of numerous other acts, some new and some old, that Payne expertly charts. By the 1990s and early 2000s, CCM had widened its influence and expanded its fan base. In the same year the Imperials released “Trumpet of Jesus,” there were 500 groups and artists performing on festival stages, in church basements, and Christian coffee houses around the country. The sale of merchandise and tickets shot up to $50 million a year. “Christian music is the fastest-growing form of popular music,” exclaimed a reporter in the New York Times in 1995. The music was “driving its message home to the tune of $750 million a year.” (Dawidoff, 1995) Six years later, the industry charted $1 billion in sales.

Payne charts this stunning success, showing how performers fused the conservative values of white evangelicalism with lively rock, soul, rap, punk, metal, and everything in between. Fittingly, the plaudits and laurels are piling up for God Gave Rock and Roll to You. OUP named it one of their Best Books of 2024, it is an Anxious Bench Editor’s Best Book of 2024, and a winner of the History/Biography Book Award from Christianity Today. That’s wonderful to see because this is a well-written, expertly researched, and timely book. I especially like that it’s helping us to think about the ways that pop culture and popular music were vital to American evangelicalism. Music, fandom, and the social world around them helped shape believers’ views about race, gender, politics, and modernity. Most importantly, Payne reveals so many important dynamics of Contemporary Christian Music that have seldom, if ever, been narrated and analyzed before. Her book especially helps us see the long history and the intricate development of styles leading up to CCM. Added to that, the story of change and decline in recent decades illuminates much about religion, pop culture, politics, and more.

Besides the humor, wit, and narrative flow of the book that make it a pleasure to read, one of the other reasons why this is a stand-out volume is the sheer range and scope of scholarship that went into it. Starting in 2020, Payne gathered hundreds of responses to a survey on CCM. Along with these, she makes expert use of old-time sheet music, denominational publications, industry materials, radio broadcasts, lyrics, interviews, sermons, and a variety of other relatively obscure works. The secondary source material is phenomenal as well, and Payne’s book joins a growing list of other volumes and articles that look at different aspects of religion and pop, folk, and rock music, including work by Greg Thornbury, Andrew Mall, Larry Eskridge, David Stowe, Andrew Beaujon, Lloyd Daniel Barba, Kate Bowler, and Wen Reagan.

There are so many different threads to pick up on from the book. But, in the interest of time, I’d like to zero in on two issues: the decline of CCM and the issues around race and appropriation. As I read God Gave Rock & Roll to You I was particularly interested in the ways Payne traces the downturn of CCM, the shrinking of the market of goods, and the fading of once-thriving networks, festivals, and bookstores that made it all possible. After a surge in the Bush and War-on-Terror years, Payne observes, “All of the patriotic fervor and end-times energy in the world, however, could not stop the business of CCM from descending into freefall. Internet streaming and file sharing pummeled the entire recording business. But CCM’s descent was arguably much steeper and faster, because the scaffolding that supported it collapsed.” (137) That especially got me wondering about demographics and the story of 21st-century evangelicalism.

For years, critics, script writers, and pop culture watchers had been making fun of CCM, and Christian Rock in particular. It was like shooting ichthys fish in a barrel. On the 2003 King of the Hill episode “Reborn to be Wild,” Hank Hill scolds an insufferable youth pastor wielding a purple electric guitar: “Can’t you see, you’re not making Christianity better. You’re just making rock and roll worse.” Had much of the public come to agree with Hank Hill? Maybe the countercultural Christianity, so central to the genre, had worn thin by the new century. Payne describes how fewer and fewer Christian artists in the 21st century wanted to be labeled as safe, family-friendly Christian alternatives to secular artists. This reminds me, in fact, of an interview with artist Daniel Smith, the leader of the critically acclaimed, left-of-the-dial indie group Danielson Famile. Famed producer Steve Albini recorded the band and Village Voice critics celebrated them. “Do you think the critics are doing a good job of understanding where you guys are coming from and understanding your music?” asked an interviewer in 2002. “I don’t know,” Smith replied. “To be honest, I can’t insist enough that we are not a Christian band, and every critic insists that we are.” He clarified: “The reason I’m against that category is because I think it implies an exclusivity, and I don’t subscribe to that. Our music is for everyone.” (Steinberger, Gadfly Online) Reading those lines brings to mind the Imperials’ song “Oh Buddha.”

We could think of other distinctive features, like CCM, that have largely faded or have reduced greatly over the decades and centuries (The downturn in the industry parallels the fading of evangelicalism among younger Americans, which the Pew Research Center has recorded). Perhaps there are parallels to the prohibitionist movement, which captured the imagination of so many Protestants before the 1930s, but had dwindled to insignificance by the postwar years. Or, maybe we could consider camp meetings and the critical social and cultural functions that these played in the 19th century, which later diminished. Gospel radio is no longer the force that it was in the Cold War era. Maybe the decline in CCM is also related to the decline of some of the distinctiveness of modern evangelicalism. For instance, the Church of the Nazarene has toned down some of its more sectarian social views since the 1980s and 1990s. Among those, which no longer hold, are bans on dancing and going to the movies.

Could it be that the genre did not seem fit for a more diverse, multicultural America? The world of CCM – artists, fans, consumers – was overwhelmingly white. Southern Gospel originated in the harsh Jim Crow world of the former Confederacy and often included nostalgic themes of an imagined pure, white southern past. Early white holiness leaders, some closely linked to the formation of Gospel music – Henry Clay Morrison, Alma White, Joseph Smith, W. A. Dodge, George D. Watson, Bud Robinson, Phineas Bresee, and others – were fierce defenders of the racial order. But this did not keep early writers and performers, as well as those after the 1960s, from borrowing wholesale from Black songs and performance styles. Billy Sunday’s music evangelist Homer Rodeheaver, who produced “Rodheaver’s Negro Spirituals,” was himself sympathetic to the KKK. Rodeheaver collected royalties from a revised version of “Old Rugged Cross,” reworked as “The Bright Fiery Cross” by a Klansman. Writing about Frank Boggs’ 1956 Southern Gospel album, Payne notes that Boggs, “repeated the white Southern Gospel practice of appropriating Black Gospel spirituals like ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’ ‘Were You There?,’ and ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’ (21). Payne also observes that “Even as CCM singers and musicians appropriated Black Gospel music, hip hop, and rap, and even as non-Christian charts diversified in the late twentieth century, the demographics of CCM artists remained remarkably consistent. Like American Christianity as a whole, the CCM world was segregated.” CCM rarely broke the musical color line, says Payne (6, 84). In April 1960 Martin Luther King, Jr. memorably commented: “I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation … that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hours, in Christian America.” (Meet the Press) In many ways, King’s remarks from over 60 years ago still apply.

Five years before King’s damning comments, the poet and novelist Langston Hughes reflected on an extreme imbalance and inequality in pop music. He declared that “It is nothing new for American whites to take American Negro songs, words, tunes, and styles, and appropriate them for their own.” But what he saw in rhythm and blues and rock and roll in the 50s amounted to “Highway Robbery across the Color Line.” White performers won all the glory and made all the big bucks, while Black musicians languished in relative obscurity (Hughes, New York Age, 10). A little over 10 years later, secular rock music itself was fracturing and becoming whiter, a process that historians like Elijah Wald, Brian Ward, and Jack Hamilton have chronicled. So, in some cases, perhaps CCM was much like its secular counterpart. Or, was it even more white, insular, and designed to serve the needs of its affluent white suburban audience? To frame the question a little differently: Was inequality and hardline conservatism baked into the genre from its earliest days up to the present? To come back to Daniel Smith’s remarks, is it not “music for everyone”?

Consider the venerable shofar. Fashioned from a ram’s horn, the shofar is the holiest instrument in Judaism. Indeed, it’s the only instrument allowed in Orthodox worship, and only on certain occasions. In the shock of the 2021 attack on the US Capitol, readers could be forgiven for not knowing that the shofar was sounded by Christian insurrectionists on January 6th and at a rally the night before. It was deployed to signal a certain martial spirit, to channel Gideon and Joshua, who conquered Jericho by circling the city and blowing a trumpet. But it also epitomizes the premillennial view that Israel will play a crucial role in the End Times and must be supported at all costs.

Christian shofar playing extends back to the first decade of CCM, namely a late 1970s song, “Jehovah Jireh,” by a husband-wife duo from Toronto. In 1996, a Messianic Jewish evangelist sounded a shofar at a historic Pentecostal revival in Pensacola, Florida. The speaker reminded the audience of the importance of the shofar as an instrument of conquest. His “rhetoric built in intensity as the music swelled around him,” Payne recounts. “‘Let the devil hear you,’ he yelled after blowing the shofar. ‘It’s war! It’s war!’ The audience roared and wept in reply.” (126).

Shofars are never heard on CCM recordings and rarely in live performance. But they epitomize nicely the political formation anatomized by God Gave Rock and Roll to You. Leah Payne narrates the often disconcerting story of how “enterprising conservative white Protestants recognized that songs of revival were (and are) powerful, portable vehicles for ideology…. 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.” (2) In her telling, CCM was intentionally engineered as marching music for conservative cultural values, especially around sexuality. And for the past half century, it has succeeded beyond all expectations.

Fifteen years ago, finishing my own book on the origins of CCM, I sought a smoking gun that linked the “Jesus music” of the first wave of hippie converts to the religious right of Falwell’s Moral Majority. The Jesus Movement struck me as fairly apolitical; figures like Larry Norman and Marsha Stevens did not seem to have much of a political agenda, certainly not a partisan one. A survey of 800 former “Jesus people” conducted by historian Larry Eskridge found that 42% identified themselves as liberal before joining the Jesus Movement, 27% as moderate. What happened?

Two Bills, for one: Billy Graham and Bill Bright, of Campus Crusade for Christ, who together spearheaded Explo 72’ – “Godstock” – which brought together tens of thousands of young evangelicals and their favorite musicians in Dallas. That was one smoking gun. As was the New York City deejay Scott Ross, who partied with the Rolling Stones, hung with the Beatles, and married a Ronette – before finding Jesus, founding a Christian commune in upstate New York, and helping build Pat Robertson’s radio empire. Definite smoking gun.

But that wasn’t much, really. I concluded that Christian popular music buttressed the religious right not through its lyrics but by helping evangelical churches retain baby boomers who might otherwise have deserted, thereby exposing them to the increasingly conservative messages coming from the pulpit. Boomers formed the backbone of the evangelical coalition that elected Ronald Reagan and subsequent Republican presidents, each more conservative than the last. It’s hard to imagine they would have flooded the megachurches to sing Sankey gospel hymns. But as Payne’s book demonstrates, CCM has had a much more direct ideological influence. Its songs and artists have been an ingenious delivery system for conservative Christian values on sexual purity, abortion, school prayer, and Christian nationalism. If I struggled to find smoking guns from the early 1970s, Payne has produced a howitzer with clouds of smoke billowing.

Her book appeared in the same season as Matthew Sutton’s noteworthy article in JAAR, challenging what he calls the “evangelical consensus” promoted by a generation of influential scholars from George Marsden to Randall Balmer. Sutton wants to decouple postwar American evangelicalism from the piety and social reform movements of the 19th century. The term “evangelical” should be reserved for post-World War II Christians of a certain stripe: essentially, white Republicans who talk a lot about Jesus. Their progenitors were not the 19th-century reformers who crusaded for abolition, women’s rights, and temperance, but the fundamentalists of the early 20th century, who fought modernism and liberalism tooth and nail. Though Sutton does not discuss music, he’s referencing the very Christians who, once they got over their aversion to electric guitars and back beats, built the CCM industry and held it to their values.

One strength of Payne’s study is its chronological scope. As she notes, most scholars of CCM have focused on the 1970s Jesus Movement. Her narrative begins at the dawn of the 20th century, when religious publishers like John T. Benson developed marketing alliances that would later serve CCM. “As the songbook business grew,” she writes, “music and money made friends out of foes, bringing Pentecostals, Baptists, Holiness people, and Methodists together as consumers.” CCM has continued this syncretic feat up to the present. Her narrative ends more than a century later, with the 2021 attack on the Capitol, whose MAGA mob included CCM fans fired up by Newsboy’s hit song, “God’s Not Dead (Like a Lion).” Payne skillfully embeds the careers of CCM artists and their fans within the larger context of evangelical culture and national politics without getting bogged down by excessive detail that would stymie her narrative.

Payne has outstanding emic bona fides to write this book. Coming of age in rural Oregon during the CCM high-water mark of the 1990s, she inevitably absorbed some of it, though her father was a Pentecostal pastor who did not care for the genre. Payne married a Christian musician and moved to Nashville, ground zero for CCM, where she landed a job as assistant to CCM luminary Charlie Peacock. Eventually, she returned to grad school in American religious history. Maybe for these reasons, her book feels at times more reported than researched. There are plenty of footnotes, but many details and examples lack citations. No doubt the sources exist, but it should be easier for readers to track them down. (The harrowing saga of Nikki Leonti (122–23) is just one example.) And I’d like to know more about the big database she collected: what larger patterns she found, and to what extent it provides the knowledge base for the book.

Broadly defined, CCM has been in a state of perennial crisis, riding a roller-coaster of ups and downs. To create music that attracts young people while at the same time placating evangelical gatekeepers like Christian bookstores and radio stations has at times seemed the musical equivalent of threading a needle while tiptoeing through a minefield. At every step were theological or moral errors to be made, any of which might derail a career. If CCM artists were not weathering attacks by fundamentalists who thought electric guitars and drum kits were sacrilegious, they worried their music was preaching to the choir, too tame to hold a teen audience. If Christian bookstores fretted that CCM was becoming too worldly for the sake of commercial gain, others were concerned that too uncompromising a message might turn off the very listeners it sought to reach. If a song did not feature enough JPMs (Jesus-per-minutes), it might run afoul of Christian radio. Too many JPMs, and it might alienate potential converts who otherwise liked the music. If CCM artists were not admitting to affairs or getting divorced, they were admitting to addiction issues, coming out as gay, or leaving open too many blouse buttons.

On the home front, if minivan-driving white suburban “Beckys” were not alarmed by the sassy lyrics and garish costumes of some CCM, their rebellious sons – “Todds” – might be smirking at mom’s lame taste in music. These Todds were likely to listen to edgier records put out by Tooth & Nail and to attend the Cornerstone festival in rural Illinois, where you could hear Christian punk, Norwegian death metal, and everything in between. They were not monolithic, and neither were Beckys; the evangelical moms of the 2020s are the daughters of the Beckys of the 1990s. Payne’s book begs the question: Have they maintained the same musical and theological preferences?

And the fabric of congregational life for CCM listeners was always changing. A direct outcome of the Jesus Movement, megachurches continued growing, at the expense of smaller churches that nurtured aspiring CCM artists. Church youth groups lost their grip as teens from evangelical families found community elsewhere or on cellphones. Nor was CCM immune to changes buffeting the record industry – streaming and illegal file-sharing – that incidentally sidestepped the gatekeepers. Like all bookstores, Christian shops were hammered by Amazon, depriving CCM of an important point of sale. Big CCM festivals like Creation dwindled in the wake of a child sexual abuse scandal. “Lean-back listeners” content with safely curated music were overtaken by “lean-in listeners,” who do their own curating from streaming services. And their preference is increasingly for megachurch-style stadium-rock worship music.

Regarding its ideological goals, CCM has a mixed record. Teenage sexual purity did not take hold the way the evangelicals hoped. CCM fan George W. Bush ascended to the White House but most of the religious right agenda remained checked by Congress or the courts. Democrats refused to go away, sometimes even winning the presidency, and advancing what the religious right considers an anti-family agenda.

Yet CCM keeps soldiering on. Payne believes that CCM peaked in the early aughts and has been in recession since then. The evidence suggests, though, that the genre, like evangelicalism, is supremely resilient. If CCM is basically a delivery system for conservative Christian values, its coalition seems stronger than ever, judging from the 2024 election. Youth groups may have faded, but Christian social media filled the gap. Covid restrictions decimated mainline churches, but evangelical churches used the pandemic to crusade against social distancing. Doctrinal disputes over End-Time theology, whether the US or Israel is key in fulfilling biblical prophecy, ceased to matter as much to CCM listeners.

If necessary, CCM even morphs into a new genre. Popular Worship Music, or praise music, has been around since the 1970s. In the past two decades, it has won listeners by losing features that made it unsuitable for radio play. In an age of ever-increasing music industry consolidation, PWM is now dominated by the stadium-rock-style worship music of Hillsong, Elevation, and Passion, whose worship/performances command ticket prices approaching $200 each. One reason for the PWM juggernaut is the massive revenue stream provided by Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), which collects licensing fees from praise music performed in churches. So, PWM seems less a distinct genre than a variant of CCM that exploits new digital media.

Payne’s declension story downplays the recent mainstreaming of CCM. In 2021, the genre was the subject of a slick full-length documentary, The Jesus Music, co-produced by Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, among others. Two years later followed a full-length feature film, The Jesus Revolution, that glowingly depicts the creation story of CCM, when a Jesus freak from Haight-Ashbury showed up at the door of an Orange County pastor. And in 2022, CBS Sunday Morning did a respectful feature pegged to Kennedy Center honors for Amy Grant, awarded the same year as Gladys Knight and U2.

All this could be taken as a sort of victory lap for CCM. At the Kennedy Center, Grant wore a rainbow mantle and received heartfelt praise from gay singer Brandi Carlile, who spoke of Grant’s formative influence and lauded her public support for queer artists, despite “taking some heat for it.” Helping Grant celebrate was the winsome West Virginian Michael W. Smith, whom Payne describes as CCM’s “complementary Ken doll” to Grant’s Barbie. Smith emerges as one of the constants in Payne’s story of constant adaptation. Whenever there is a Republican president or conservative evangelical in need of moral support, Michael W. Smith will be at their side, providing musical succor. But never, so far, with a shofar.

At the 2022 gathering of the American Society of Church History, a distinguished scholar from a venerable institution (name redacted, to protect his dignity) shared with me an encyclopedic knowledge of 1980s Contemporary Christian Music (aka CCM). After remembering several classics, including Sandi Patty and Wayne Watson’s 1990 smash hit duet “Another Time… Another Place,” he shook himself. “I need to get into another headspace,” he told me, “I’ve got to give a presentation!” The supposed silliness of CCM behind him, he went on his way to discuss the serious things of church history.

I had conversations like this so often while writing God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music that I eventually felt that I acquired an additional vocation: that of a CCM confessor. Musical taste may not typically be categorized as a matter of sin or sanctification, but the market niche of CCM is famously maligned for being derivative, corny, and shallow, and admitting CCM fandom comes with a certain risk of shame or guilt. I am grateful to those who chose to share their love and/or hate of CCM with me, because as a CCM confessor, I heard about much more than music. I heard tales of raucous youth group all-nighters, clandestine make out sessions in church sanctuaries, and smoking weed at Christian music festivals. Indeed, most CCM confessions were not about the market niche; they were about growing up within the market-driven boundaries of predominantly white evangelical Christianity.

God Gave Rock and Roll to You attempts to show the full range of responses to CCM as a form of catechesis through the marketplace: the joy and grief, the rage and wonder, the revulsion and attraction. João Chaves’s review stands out for its vulnerability and perceptiveness when it comes to how those CCM memories shaped evangelical adolescents. Chaves’ musical memories – of Santo Sepulcro in Brazil, of praying with Switchfoot, and of cheering for Pillar – are exactly the kind of listener testimonies that animate the book and accompany me during the research process. Chaves’ question about teenage listeners who “might never have bought into the either/or frameworks imagined by their souls’ supposed managers” gets to the heart of one of the book’s underlying themes: the boundaries constructed by evangelical caregivers and gatekeepers were often transgressed by those they intended to shape, and upended by technological innovations and the marketplace.

Indeed, many teens raised with a “CCM rule” clandestinely curated mainstream musical tastes. As Chaves rightly suggests, the Britney Spears paradigm might apply: CCM listeners were “not that innocent” when it came to navigating the moral or aesthetic boundaries of evangelicalism. While the book alludes to these dynamics, Chaves’ review prompts me to say more directly what I often heard in interviews: not all or even most young listeners lived in a sealed fortress against “the world,” as their caregivers imagined. Rather, for many, the CCM rule served as a catalyst for self-differentiation and meaning-making in a complex social and cultural terrain.

Chaves’ Migrational Religion: Context and Creativity in the Latinx Diaspora was helpful for me as I analyzed “The Send,” and Jair Bolsonaro’s warm relationship to charismatic Christian supporters. Events like The Send raise urgent questions about CCM’s successor industry, the worship music business, and its relationship to authoritarianism and transnational right-wing politics. God Gave Rock and Roll to You argues that CCM’s political messaging often reflected the largely domestic aims of the Billy Graham coalition of white evangelicalism: to create healthy, productive, patriotic citizens of the United States. These young Americans would testify to the spiritual good of an exceptional American democracy, in contrast to the “godless” communists in the USSR and China. This very Baptist interest in democracy as a theological good reflected the Southern Baptist Convention’s dominance in 20th century white evangelicalism.

The worship business, by contrast, reflects the globalization of conservative charismatic Christian activism through music. The Send invites historians to ask what happens when the sonic architecture of revivalism – music, tears, altar calls – is repurposed beyond the borders of American exceptionalism to sanctify portable 21st century nationalistic dreams? God Gave Rock and Roll to You argues that charismatics do not share the Cold War Era Southern Baptist appreciation for American democracy. Rather, charismatic nationalisms are grounded in Pentecostal zionism. That zionism is constituted through and animated by worship music hits like Gui Brazil’s “Yeshua.” In this theo-political imagination, God’s nation is the eschatological state of Israel, not Brazil, nor the USA, nor any other nation on earth.

As worship music traverses the globe, it creates networks of transnational charismatic Christian activism, and I am especially interested in how worship music’s aesthetic of intimacy and unity is mobilized politically. These affective tools may not have the on-the-nose conservative messaging of CCM, but the fact that worship music played a key role in the rituals of the January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot in the US, and the January 8, 2023 riots in the Brazilian capitol 2 years later, invites scholars to interrogate how these musical communities transmit ideology.

John Maiden captures with precision what I hoped the book might achieve: to let the quirks of the CCM world speak for themselves, while also taking its actors and the global scale of its effects seriously. I did not want to sneer at the cultural formations of CCM, nor did I want to sanctify them. I wanted the seriousness and the silliness to shine through. Maiden is right that the use of human testimony in God Gave Rock & Roll to You could be expanded. Comments from the survey of over 1,200 listeners informed the shape and tone of this book, but future work – perhaps a companion volume or digital humanities project – could focus more explicitly on their narratives in aggregate and individual forms.

Maiden’s reference to Catherine Bell’s ritual theory and the “strategic power relationships” embedded in CCM rituals reflects another key aim of the book: to see evangelicalism not only as a set of beliefs or a commercial religion, but also as a performative world. The “Jesus music” altar call, the album-burning bonfire, and the mosh pit all operate as sites where power, doctrine, and devotion are contested and (re)produced. From a ritual studies perspective, the story of Contemporary Christian Music is the story of how transnational charismatic practitioners emerged in the 21st century as apex revivalists. Their adaptations of revivalist rituals have market viability in the music industry and portability through streaming technologies and social media platforms. Maiden’s Age of the Spirit: Charismatic Renewal, the Anglo-World, and Global Christianity, 1945–1980 was an invaluable resource for this book, and I am grateful for his call for deeper engagement with global charismatic networks, which echoes Chaves’ analysis, and underscores the value of mapping transnational flows in the study of 21st century Christian practitioners.

Randall Stephens’s review brings a historian’s eye and a personal stake to bear on the issues of race and racism, appropriation, and decline. Stephens’ engagement with “Oh Buddha” is both critical and nostalgic, which captures something essential about CCM’s character: its capacity to boil conservative white Protestant norms into remarkably efficient, exceedingly singable forms. Stephens’ wry observation that the song functioned as a kind of prebuttal to “Coexist” bumper stickers encapsulates the industry’s long history of theological sloganeering for white evangelical communities.

As the book argues, CCM’s commercial scaffolding was built largely by and for suburban, middle-class white audiences, even as it drew liberally from Black musical traditions, as Stephens argues in The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ‘n’ Roll. As the industry grew in the late twentieth century, CCM did not just fail to diversify; it often re-inscribed segregationist assumptions, sometimes unwittingly and sometimes by design. While most industry insiders and consumers would recoil at this statement, in aggregate form, the market niche rarely made room for Black artists. I agree with Stephens that race and CCM deserve much more critical attention, particularly as an increasingly diverse group of evangelical practitioners reflect on their musical and theological inheritance.

Stephens’ reflection on CCM’s decline and parallels with older Protestant subcultures (like the camp meeting or temperance movement) highlights how concerts updated revivalist rituals for a generation of revivalists well-versed in twentieth century American media, marketing, and celebrity cultures. The move from artists like the Imperials to stadium-worship music like Hillsong and Elevation suggests continuity, and also signals a reorientation. Worship music’s ascent and its capacity to transmit market-sensitive, increasingly homogenized theological and political visions through streaming technology and social media suggests that while CCM has declined, reviving endures.

David Stowe’s image of the shofar – re-appropriated in charismatic worship circles as a battle cry for Christian nationalism – brings a major social and political finding of God Gave Rock and Roll to You to the fore. CCM operated not just as background music but as a potent ideological delivery system in the hands of “enterprising conservative white Protestants.” The music, and the surrounding constellations of media and material cultures, became a means of shaping hearts and disciplining bodies.

Stowe’s No Sympathy for the Devil Christian: Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism shaped my understanding of CCM, and his analysis here is generous and generative. While earlier scholars rightly emphasized CCM’s role in evangelical retention, like Stowe, I wanted to explore its more active theological and political work. Anthems like “God’s Not Dead” or “Jesus Freak,” when performed at rallies or shared on social media, become more than entertainment. They become formation.

Stowe’s point about the resilience of CCM is also well taken. What I describe as “declension” in traditional CCM applied to sales data and institutional measures of evangelical thriving (e.g., attendance and membership), which upheld one form of the industry. But the story of CCM could also be understood as a metamorphosis away from retail and institutions into a streaming-based, network-driven, social-media-centric worship music business. Indeed, Amy Grant’s medal at the Kennedy Center awards suggests that even within this new landscape, CCM icons still carry cultural capital – perhaps akin to other decorated forms of popular music like jazz or the blues that live on, albeit in legacy form.

No discussion about the legacy of CCM could be complete without a word about the true authority in the industry: evangelical moms, known by the digital marketing persona of “Beckys.” Because the vast majority of 1980s-early aughts CCM was distributed through Christian bookstores, not music retail outlets, Christian bookstore patronesses – white, middle-class, suburban moms – were the primary purchasers of the music, and by far the most imposing gatekeepers of the soundtrack of evangelical theology and practice.

Through their buying power, Beckys drove evangelical conversations about Christian thought and practice, and Stowe asks critical questions about their daughters. Beckys’ daughters’ listening habits have changed along with the advent of streaming technologies, but have their theologies? Demographically speaking, the daughters of Beckys are not as numerous as their mothers’ generation, and their collective clout is thus diminished. According to Christian radio promoters, it is English-speaking Latinas who advertisers and activists now see as the future of conservative catechesis through consumption. If polling data is to be trusted, most of those women should be counted among the transnational charismatic communities on the rise in the United States and around the world.

It is a rare and humbling gift to read such thoughtful, engaged responses to God Gave Rock and Roll to You. I am sincerely grateful to Drs. João Chaves, John Maiden, Randall Stephens, and David Stowe for their careful readings of my work. Each response does what the best reviews do: clarify, complicate, and open up novel areas for exploration. In the end, God Gave Rock and Roll to You is a history, not the history, and it is not meant to deliver a final word on CCM. The work of understanding evangelicalism through its commercial cultural formations continues, and the seriousness and silliness of those formations continue to shape public life in the United States and beyond.