“Lift Each Other Up”: Punk, Politics, and Secularization at Christian Festivals
International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch
IASPM-US, online, May 18, 2021.
For the 2021 IASPM-US annual conference, I and three other panelists (Joshua Kalin Busman, Nathan Myrick, and Maren Haynes Marchesini) developed conference-paper versions of the chapters we contributed to the volume Christian Punk: Identity and Performance, edited by Ibrahim Abraham. (More about my chapter here.) We submitted pre-recorded videos in advance of the online conference; you can my video below. Our Zoom panel, which includes brief introductions from all four panelists and a Q&A with the audience, takes place 2-3pm (EDT) on Tuesday, May 18, 2021.
Abstract
When I began research at U.S. Christian rock festivals in 2009, I was not surprised by the prevalence of political messages of the kind popularly associated with white American evangelicals. The merchandise tents were littered with vendors and organizations promoting anti-abortion, “traditional” marriage, and abstinence-only sex education causes, among others. What did surprise me, however, was the noticeable lack of these discourses from the festivals’ most highly anticipated acts on its largest stages: commercially successful bands performing punk rock, hardcore, metalcore, and heavy metal. Indeed, Christian bands—especially those that regularly transgress boundaries between Christian and secular “general” markets—typically avoid political issues in songs, interviews, and performances. Instead, they sing and speak in metaphors meaningful to believers and non-believers alike.
When the members of Flatfoot 56, a Celtic punk band from Chicago, speak of “brotherhood” at Cornerstone and AudioFeed, two Christian music festivals, they refer to congregational cohesion; at a secular punk venue, however, scene unity is just as likely an interpretation. Whereas Christian punks sacralize secular places, such as the bars and nightclubs where they often perform (McDowell 2018), this chapter suggests that at these Christian festivals bands like Flatfoot 56 might be thought to secularize sacred places by decentering U.S. evangelicalism’s most controversial public positions. Through an ethnographic analysis of Flatfoot 56 performances, considering what is sung/spoken aloud and what is not, this paper argues for a nuanced, mediating perspective that recognizes an ambivalence about identity politics among many evangelical subculturalists moving between secular and sacred spaces.
Panel abstract
Christian punk is no oxymoron. Emerging in Californian churches in the 1980s, establishing itself in secular hardcore scenes in the 1990s, and achieving critical acclaim and chart-topping commercial success in the 2000s, Christian punk is a surprising musical subculture and a fascinating example of contemporary expressions of evangelicalism in the United States. Including light-hearted pop-punk, aggressive hardcore, apocalyptic metalcore, and many subgenres in between these extremes, Christian punk is an expression of religious belief, personal struggle, and resistance to the disenchanted culture of late modernity. This panel’s participants, each of whom has contributed a chapter to the volume Christian Punk: Identity and Performance (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), situate Christian punk within the contemporary history of Christianity and the changing culture of spirituality and secularity.
Each panelist illustrates how Christian punk continues punk’s autonomous and oppositional creative practices within a typically traditional evangelical morality within a particular case study or set of case studies. We address, in turns, concepts of gender identity, authenticity and resistance, race, style, and secularism within Christian punk at clubs, churches, and festivals. Drawing from music studies and other disciplines (including religious studies, philosophy, and others), together we illustrate how the study of religious musics in general, and Christian punk in particular, contributes to larger discourses within the study of popular music and music industries.