In Christian music, will business bury faith?

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 12, 1999 by Robin Taylor

Evidently, the strategy was successful. "Supernatural" premiered at number four on the Billboard 200 album chart last October and sold more than 100,000 copies in one week.

Jars of Clay, another group with widespread mainstream success, has records distributed both on Christian label Essential Records and mainstream Silvertone. Essential and Silvertone are both owned by the Zomba Group.

A Faustian pact

Some worry that this mainstream distribution amounts to a Faustian pact for Christian musicians. Cracking the Billboard Top 200, they charge, has meant surrendering some of what gave gospel music its identity.

Such concerns would hardly be assuaged by the kind of reviews Jars of Clay's second album, "Much Afraid," drew. Bob Gulla, reviewer for Internet music site Wall of Sound, said the group "buried the Christian elements of their sound well enough for us pagans to enjoy `Much Afraid' without feeling much discomfort."

That kind of talk has made some Christian musicians distinctly uncomfortable. Rich Mullins, dubbed the "uneasy conscience of Christian music" at the 1998 Dove Awards, was a successful songwriter who took a vow of poverty and moved to a Navajo reservation to teach music. Mullins was posthumously awarded the Dove award for "Artist of the Year" after he was killed in an auto accident in September 1997.

In an interview just nine months before his death, Mullins admitted that he had been "really nasty" about the contemporary Christian music industry. He complained that people didn't get the politics of his songs (for example, "there's something offensive to me about having an American flag in a church building"), and said that he wasn't sure that "people with our cultural disabilities" were capable of "having souls, or being saved."

Mullins said that U.S. Christians "grow up in a culture that worships pleasure, leisure and affluence" and that the church is "doubly damned when they use Jesus as a vehicle for achieving all of that." Other Christian musicians saw in Mullins' remarks a pointed criticism of their tacit alliance with big business.

Steve Camp, who released his first Christian album in 1978, issued "A Call for Reformation in the Contemporary Christian Music Industry" in 1997, urging his fellow artists to return to their roots, where they "fearlessly sang clearly about the gospel."

Now, he complains, Christian music "yodels of a Christ-less, watered down, pabulum-based, positive alternative, aura-fluff, cream of wheat, mush-kind-of-syrupy, God-as-my-girlfriend kind of thing." He adds, "The promise of increased financial resources, wider distribution and a larger audience is not justification for the surrender of our spiritual autonomy."

Gospel Music Association President Frank Breeden, perhaps unsurprisingly, disagrees. "There was a significant amount of fear when the big entertainment conglomerates got involved in Christian music," he said. "What reality shows us is that these companies are investing because there's a market, it's what people wanted.