“Is This the Blessing or the Curse?” Christian Popular Music’s Parallel History

International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch

IASPM-US, Cincinnati, Ohio, March 12, 2011 (joint with SAM).

This paper’s title is taken from a song by The Chariot.

Material from this paper was published in God Rock, Inc.

Abstract

From humble beginnings in the Jesus People Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s to its growth into a $500 million industry by the end of the 1990s, the contemporary Christian music (CCM) recording industry has become one of the most visible (and audible) features of evangelical Christian culture in the United States. CCM’s market is larger than that of Latin music or jazz (among other genres), and CCM artists have achieved significant commercial success crossing over into the mainstream popular music industry. Why, then, has CCM largely been written out of the history of rock and popular music in the United States? Some have linked CCM’s separateness to larger and longer trends of evangelical secession from the American public sphere (Hendershot 2004, Luhr 2009), yet this does little to explain why there remains a dearth of significant scholarship on Christian popular music. The case study of CCM provides an opportunity for popular music scholarship to reflect on hierarchies of taste and faith (or lack thereof) within accepted histories of popular music. In this paper, I examine the historical forces that shaped the CCM industry as separate and distinct from the mainstream industry, and consider how these forces have also contributed to the relative absence of scholarship on Christian popular music within popular music studies’ canons. I rely primarily on historical and ethnographic research on the Christian popular music recording industry undertaken for my dissertation in 2009–2010.