Christian Rock
The Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Musics of the World, Volume VIII: Genres in North America
Co-edited by John Shepherd and David Horn
Abstract
Since the emergence of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) in the early 1970s as the dominant category of popular music marketed to white evangelical Christians, there have been Christian recording artists whose music has failed to meet the aesthetic, contextual, economic, ideological, lyrical, stylistic or theological requirements of the US CCM recording industry. Early “Christian rock” artists’ theological message located them on the periphery of the secular popular music recording industry, while their aggressive sound—heavily influenced by contemporary rock music—located them on the periphery of the existing Christian music recording industry, which focused primarily on sacred music and hymnody. While early twenty-first century CCM is significantly more diverse, many artists still find themselves relegated to the peripheries of both the CCM and secular popular music recording industries, due to their musical style and/or their theological message. Christian rock thus consists of artists that operate on the “fringe” of the CCM recording industry (or outside of it entirely) yet perform, produce, and record music for the Christian popular music market—that is, exclusive from the general (secular) popular music market. To the extent that CCM can be described as the principal mainstream genre of Christian popular music, Christian rock constitutes a subgenre peripheral to the CCM mainstream. Christian rock’s emergence and history are tied to those of CCM—notably, both genres are rooted in the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and have developed side by side in the decades since—yet the ways in which artists address common debates within the American church serve to distinguish Christian rock as both a descriptive and prescriptive category within the Christian popular music recording industry.