Leah Payne's "God Gave Rock and Roll to You"

What CCM tells us about evangelicalism writ large

Book update: Taking a week away from the SubStack gave me time to work through the copyedits of my book. The copyeditor did a phenomenal job of cleaning up my lazy writing habits while maintaining my voice and argument. I submitted my clean copy yesterday. Next step is to begin design work. I should have page proofs to review by mid-July. Still looking at publication in Spring 2025.

I never followed Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). Heck, I don’t follow Contemporary Music of any kind. Still, when Leah Payne’s book on CCM started circulating on my social media, I knew I should take a look.

Leah is associate professor of American Religion History at George Fox’s Portland Seminary. “God Gave Rock and Roll to You” is a cultural history of the CCM movement and its role in American Evangelicalism.

She frames her argument with a general history of music publishing, songbooks, traveling groups, and religious crusades. To be honest, this part of the book proved more familiar to this writer in the last half year of his seventh decade. The Gaithers, Sandi Patty, Cliff Barrows, George Beverly Shea, and many others fill the early chapters.

Then came rock and roll. While there were some preachers who made the argument that the demon beats of rock were opening listeners to African witch doctor influences, most tried to figure out how to adapt. She writes:

The attempt to stigmatize rock as roll as worldly, even satanic, and to distinguish it from sacred music was doomed from the start. For one thing, popular mainstream music with direct references to Christian spirituality undermined the effort to distinguish between “sacred” music and “secular/satanic” music. At no point did general market audiences in the United States, the vast majority of whom were Christian, shows sustained hostility to Christian themes in popular music. (28)

This echoes the challenges of evangelicalism more generally. Attempts to distinguish between “the church” and “the world” require a hyperbolic image of the latter and a glowing image of the former. It’s a lot of work and difficult to maintain over time.

She traces the role of music festivals in creating what we now know as CCM. That these were “insider” events drawing upon the energies of Boomers coming of age and generally ignored by the larger marketplace is part of that institutional segmentation. Central to the rise of CCM, she argues, was the Christian Bookstore and the mothers who shopped there. She says the bookstore enterprise called these mothers “Beckys”: “A suburban, middle-to-upper class middle-class straight woman who raised her kids with the help of Contemporary Christian Music. (130)”

She traces the relationship between purity culture and youth group music. This provided the impetus for Becky to get recommendations from the local book store as she looked for safe CCM versions of less modest popular singers.

Christian Radio stations, especially those affiliated with Salem broadcasting promoted Christian music interspersed with preaching and advice shows. It was not unusual for Christian colleges to have their own stations, introducing students to the Christian Music business. Programs in music business proliferated and the CCCU created a study center in Nashville.

Colleges provided regular opportunities for Christian bands to establish and find fame. Jars of Clay, and DC Talk were college bands. I remember how in the late 1990s, I tried to get our college band to stay in school rather than go become famous. I failed and today Kutless is 25 years old (with only one of its original members).

Leah recounts how bands would model their style after a secular counterpart. She describes

charts that compared CCM to Top 40 music. “If you love Bon Jovi,” the charts would say with confidence, “you’ll love Petra! (85)”

The challenges arises when the youth discovered that the parallel goes both ways. If you love Petra, you should try Bon Jovi!

Artists also found the barriers between CCM and popular music to be more fluid. That’s the story of the crossover artist — notably when Amy Grant moved to a mainstream label (and launched the “three button controversy”). Artists looking to be respected for their music found themselves struggling with moral clauses and expected social positions (LGBTQ+ at the top of the list) could find it easier to jump ship.

Several factors contributed to challenges to that earlier attempt to separate sacred from secular. Amazon challenged the viability of the small Christian bookstore. Music sharing and subscription services didn’t need a Becky to police the airwaves. Christian radio added political programming that merged CCM with Republican talking points.

Reading her book reminded me of others. Like Daniel Vaca’s work on religious publishing, Katelyn Beaty’s on celebrity pastors, Kristin DuMez’s on masculinity, and my conversations with Joey Cochran about his Brand Evangelicals book, we see all the ways in which attempts to create a parallel universe within evangelicalism is fraught with challenge. Rather than teaching our churches techniques of cultural discernment, we attempt to create artificial boundaries. These boundaries are remarkably difficult to maintain over time and require immense effort which would be better spent on the development of our people.

So, even though I couldn’t tell Swithfoot from Audio Adrenaline, I’m glad I read Leah Payne’s book. It adds to our understandings of the evangelical movement over the last five decades and may even point the way toward a better future for everybody.