Sacred Pop

Insight on the News, May 22, 2000 by Julia Duin

A new generation of Christian musicians Is reaching out to mainstream listeners.

Not long ago, contemporary Christian music was walled off from secular culture and staffed by groups with Scripture-laden names such as Second Chapter of Acts, Point of Grace and 4Him. Now Christian groups with monikers such as the Galactic Cowboys, MxPx and Burlap to Cashmere are climbing the charts. In an age when spirituality is the rage and when fans can order anything, Christian or secular, on the Internet, lines between religious and nonreligious music are blurring.

Leading the way are rock musicians, says Mark Joseph, the 32-year-old founder of MJM Entertainment Group in Los Angeles and author of a new book, The Rock & Roll Rebellion. Christian rock music, a genre developed in the early 1970s, was seen as reinforcing secular rock and inherently evil. Today, religious rock `n' rollers, such as the Flint, Mich.-based Full on the Mouth, spurn Christian record labels for a spot on the Warped tour, a traveling show of mostly punk bands.

"In the great war of ideas and the battle for the hearts and minds of the culture, musical artists who were Christians exiled themselves from pop culture," Joseph says. The result: Their music was banished to "gospel" or "inspirational" racks in the stores, cut out of radio shows and absent from popular arenas such as Woodstock. Joseph compares the phenomenon to baseball's Negro Leagues of the early 20th century, where major players displayed their talents in obscurity.

Steve Rabey, a Colorado Springs writer who covers contemporary Christian music, calls it the "evangelical-industrial complex" -- a parallel universe of book and magazine publishers, Internet companies and record publishers of Christian materials. "Bach and other composers wrote sacred music, but it was also music the entire culture appreciated" he says. "Evangelicals and their fundamentalist ancestors have had a love-and-hate relationship -- primarily hate -- with the mass media for decades, so they've developed this subculture."

It's also true that some rock musicians, including Steve Taylor and 1950s crooner Pat Boone, have been shunned by the larger rock culture because of their outspoken Christian or pro-life views. Once word was out in 1983 that disco queen Donna Summer was a born-again Christian, disc jockeys refused to play her records and some records were publicly burned.

But the devout often have obscured themselves. Some Christian musicians sought to evangelize during their concerts, something secular fans shunned. Others avoided songs that addressed contemporary problems, preferring to sing about the rewards of heaven instead.

This dichotomy destroyed Christian rock ingenue Leslie Phillips. Even before she entered the secular arena and renamed herself "Sam" Phillips, her songs about depression, sexual temptation and the beauty of evil were raising hackles. Then came her infamous 1987 appearance at a Christian concert at Southern California's Knotts Berry Farm, where she sang Bob Dylan tunes and half of her audience walked out.

"I've never seen anything like it in my life" says Joseph, who was at the concert. "To be fair, I think she provoked it. She had this sexy outfit on, dyed her hair black and sang songs people didn't know. I think she handled it wrong, but her objections were real."

Despite plentiful accounts of human sexuality in biblical sagas such as that of King David, not to mention the sensuously written Song of Solomon, Christian music has been uneasy with songs about wedded love, much less anything dealing with sexuality. "There have been a couple of cases where guys have written love songs about their wives" he says, "and stores have refused to sell them or the Gospel Music Association wouldn't say they were Christian songs."

Such was the case with the popular Amy Grant, who released a song titled "That's What Love Is," who since has gone mainstream. Joseph parallels Grant's path to secular fame with that of columnist Cal Thomas, who resigned his position with the Moral Majority in the mid-1980s and began to write for the Los Angeles Times syndicate. Now in 500 newspapers, his is the country's most widely syndicated column.