Our Worship Is Turning Praise into Secular Profit
Christianity Today (2023). Author Kelsey Kramer McGinnis quotes from God Rock, Inc. in her article on the the corporate consolidation of worship music.
Recent Books on Christian Music
Popular Music Books in Process roundtable presentation (2021). Nathan Myrick, Marcell Silva Steuernagel, and myself discussed our recent books in conversation with each other as part of the PMBiP series of author talks, co-sponsored by IASPM-US, JPMS, and the Popcon.
“Beer & Hymns” and Community: Religious Identity and Participatory Sing-alongs
Yale Journal of Music and Religion (2021). As a series of loosely-organized events, “Beer & Hymns” started at the Greenbelt Festival in England in 2006 and migrated to the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina in 2012. Local Beer & Hymns gatherings meet at bars, breweries, clubs, and pubs across the U.K., the U.S., and around the world. In this article, I analyze the sonic and social fabric of Beer & Hymns as a participatory space that promotes community, contextualized against white U.S. evangelicalism’s contested relationship with the secular.
Studying Congregational Music: Chapter 7
Studying Congregational Music, Routledge (2021). Chapter 7, “Political Economy and Capital in Congregational Music Studies: Commodities, Worshipers, and Worship,” by Andrew Mall.
Review of Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America, by Ari Y. Kelman
Yale Journal of Music and Religion (2020). In this review of Ari Y. Kelman's Shout to the Lord: Making Worship Music in Evangelical America (NYU Press, 2018), I describe the strengths and challenges of examining the cultural production of worship music thematically, as Kelman has chosen to focus on songwriting, worship leading, and the music industry in sequence.
“As For Me and My House”: Christian Music Executives Roundtable
Journal of Popular Music Studies (2020). At the 2018 IASPM-US conference in Nashville, I organized a roundtable of Christian music executives. This was a unique opportunity to hear Christian music executives discussing the unique challenges and issues they face in a popular music market for which religious identity is necessarily a core component. Roundtable participants have worked in A&R, executive leadership, higher education, music ministry, music super- vision, production, publishing, radio promotions, and recording, among other roles, and represent more than 100 years of cumulative experience as music industry professionals.
Worship Capital: On the Political Economy of Worship Music
American Music (2018). Scholars and scholar-practitioners from a wide variety of disciplinary and faith backgrounds have enriched our understandings of the ways in which music functions in worship contexts around the world. Yet, the political economy of worship music remains underexamined and undertheorized. In this article, I develop the theory of ‘worship capital’ as a corrective.
“As for me and my house”: Nashville, the Home of Christian Music
IASPM-US roundtable (2018). For this roundtable, current and former Christian music professionals who have worked in A&R, executive leadership, higher education, music ministry, publishing, and radio promotions, among other roles, address the unique challenges that face Christian music. With many combined decades of experience in organizations large and small, our panelists are well-attuned to the city’s centeredness to the Christian music industries. We consider how Christian music has impacted Nashville, address the difficulties of maintaining a profitable business while conducting a ministry, and consider the boundaries of Christian music—increasingly porous as they are—in the broader contexts of globalized entertainment.
The Ethnomusicology of Religion: Fieldwork Methods and Ethics
SEM conference roundtable panelist (2017). Ethnographic fieldwork is often shaped by logistical issues including access, documentation, rapport, and fluency (both cultural and linguistic). Ethnomusicologists researching musics within religious or sacred contexts, however, face additional challenges. For example, moments of spiritual transcendence complicate participant-observation, both for ethnographers who belong to the faith tradition they are researching and for those who do not. Similarly, the varied expectations of the researcher’s audiences problematize documentation and representation. In this roundtable, participants consider these and other issues, addressing the ethical and methodological challenges of fieldwork posed by the ethnomusicology of religion.
Worship Capital, Evangelicalism, and the Political Economy of Congregational Music
SCSM conference presentation (2016). Building upon the works of Pierre Bourdieu, analyses of music industries, and contemporary discourses of intellectual property, this paper outlines a theoretical framework for the political economy of worship music and considers barriers to integrating this framework into our scholarship and practice. This research emerges from several years of ethnographic fieldwork at the Anchor Fellowship, a non-denominational evangelical church in Nashville, Tennessee, and advances the concept of “worship capital” to capture the various ways in which individuals and institutions invest in worship.
Studying Worship Capital: Cultural Insiderness, Religious Outsiderness, and Political Economy in Evangelical Worship
Yale ISM Fellows’ Lunch presentation (2015). The presence of capital in Christian worship is unmistakable, enabling individuals and institutions to participate in the production, distribution, mediation, and consumption of worship music. Performing artists, songwriters, and ministers operate in markets that shape the aesthetics of songs that congregations sing every Sunday morning. This worship economy, however, remains undertheorized in congregational music studies.
“We Can Be Renewed”: Resistance, Renewal, and Worship at the Anchor Fellowship
The Spirit of Praise, Penn State University Press (2015). Live music is integral to worship services, where aesthetics of charismatic worship and rock concerts often overlap. This chapter examines the ways in which the Anchor Fellowship’s theology, worship practices, and congregational music are co-constitutive. This work participates in a growing literature on contemporary Christian worship music practices and contributes to scholarship that addresses peripheral musical activities.
Capital, Class, and Congregational Matters: The Political Economy of Worship Music
Christian Congregational Music conference presentation (2015). Building upon the works of Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1986, 1993), Jacques Attali (1985), and contemporary discourses of intellectual property, how might we consider the ways in which other forms of capital (cultural, intellectual, religious, social, etc.) are implicated in these markets? How do markets mediate between distinct congregations and globalized worship industries? This paper outlines a theoretical framework for the political economy of worship music, considering the roles of capital(s) in its production, distribution, mediation, and consumption.
Christian Popular Music, U.S.A.
The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, Canterbury Press (2013). Christian popular music is an umbrella category for a sonically diverse repertoire of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century evangelical Protestant commercial popular music. It encompasses several distinct subcategories based on musical genre, industrial context, or function including, but not limited to, Jesus Music, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM), Praise & Worship music, and Christian rock.
Subculture as Liturgy: Resistance and Worship among Subcultural Christians
Christian Congregational Music conference presentation (2013). Based on several years’ of ethnographic research, this paper examines the musical practices of two subcultural Christian communities in the U.S.: Nashville’s Anchor Fellowship and western Illinois’s Cornerstone Festival. Music and congregational song are very important to these liminal spaces, challenging old boundaries and defining new ones. Subculture itself becomes liturgical, and the political potential of corporate worship and popular music is often made explicit. In illustrating these communities, their sounds, and their ideologies, this paper both demonstrates the utility of subcultural theory to the study of congregational song and challenges Hebdige’s dialectic of incorporation.
“We Are Called Here to Worship Together”: Ethnographic Outsiderness and Insiderness in Religious and Popular Culture
SEM conference presentation (2012). In this paper, based on several years of ethnographic research at the Anchor Fellowship, I address the challenges of fieldwork as a religious outsider and cultural insider. In constructing a rich description of an Anchor worship service based on my observations, those of church-goers, and formal interviews of Anchor pastors, this paper confronts the multivalence of experience and the interpretation thereof, demonstrating the importance of phenomenology to ethnography of religious and popular cultures.
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