God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music
Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock and Roll To You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music chronicles the confluence of evangelical, Pentecostal, and charismatic networks through the lens of Contemporary Christian Music, or CCM. The book indexes American evangelicalism’s political and social aspirations as seen through its cultural intermediaries: the youth group leaders, non-profit groups, industry executives, and parents who contributed to what was morally permissible and economically profitable in CCM. As Payne describes, the “CCM [industry] produced music that served as a sonic shorthand for white evangelical orthodoxy and social action, prized for its capacity to disseminate evangelical messages about what it means to be Christian and American” (2).
The book is a winsome and fast-paced history. Payne’s first successes with this book were in the social media campaign to collect stories of CCM in the lives of its listeners. Thousands responded and some of these anonymized accounts pepper the book’s pages. As it turns out, there are a lot of “recovering” or “deconstructing” evangelicals interested in adjudicating the role CCM played in their upbringing and the stories aid in grounding the text in the experience of its subjects.
Payne is an American religious historian who has written on the role of Neo-Pentecostals in politics, and the book’s introduction also demonstrates her credentials as a CCM insider and bona fide critic of evangelicals. As a graduate student in Nashville, TN, she worked at Charlie Peacock’s The Art House and rubbed shoulders with many CCM artists who passed through its doors. (Peacock is arguably one of CCM’s most vocal and prominent insider-turned-critics and his calls to CCM’s better angels echo through the pages of the book.)
Though the book is ostensibly a history of music, it is a project that contributes to the present-day reckoning with the definition of “evangelical” and those who claim the slippery term. Here it functions as a social and political designation more than a theological one. Often it reads from the perspective of the trenches of the evangelical cultural war. It maps CCM on to the well-worn pathways of American religiosity, including white revivalism: the churches, camp meetings, Bible colleges, and faith-based entertainment venues that served as campaign stops for itinerant preachers and their musical companions. Payne suggests that CCM, like American evangelicalism more broadly, was and is always entrenched in the constructions of race and sex/gender, among other social issues which were adjudicated in these religious spaces.
The book also comes as part of a recent wave of publications that have defined American evangelicalism by proxy, namely, by attempting to make sense of its entrenchment in the so-called conservative or Republican political movement. Seen alongside Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s Jesus and John Wayne or Anthea Butler’s White Evangelical Racism, God Gave Rock and Roll to You may tempt a casual reader to think that American evangelical history is primarily a story of white patriarchal power, and that theological reflection only comes after-the-fact. See, for example, chapter six’s portrayal of the way the lives of female have been scrutinized and publicly policed by the CCM industry. Each of these books is a vital contribution to understanding U.S. political and cultural history. Readers interested in music and worship in evangelical churches as such would do well to engage other narratives of evangelicalism’s practical diversity, as in Melanie Ross’s Evangelical Worship: An American Mosaic (not to mention a look at the global adherents who claim the name “evangelical”).
Nevertheless, one helpful contribution of the book is the way that the CCM industry is portrayed as a bridge that connects Evangelicals and Pentecostals. That bridge has helped link the political and social visions of these groups; though they were once more discrete entities in American history the narratives of spiritual threat and moral decline have effectively woven their religious and national aspirations together. The bookends of her history suggest that CCM is returning to its roots in the Pentecostal movement in the way it has been weaponized in recent years by charismatics and Pentecostals vying for political power (cf. Trump’s courting of charismatic church leaders, esp. the networks affiliated with The New Apostolic Reformation).
One notable dynamic that comes through in the book is the way that CCM is both a meaningful cultural expression of Christian young people and deeply influenced by the consumption patterns (and politics) of parents. She distills this in her discussion of early Jesus music, describing it as having “less ‘adult’ supervision” (41) and often an anti-authoritarian ethos. The popular musics of the prior decade, namely the late 1950s and 1960s, were often written by professional musicians with some degree of formal theological and musical training and passed through denominational publishing houses and/or adult filters. As the industry of CCM grew into the 1990s, that “adult supervision” reared its head again as Christian bookstore owners filtered parent’s access to Christian musics and parents further filtered that for their own children. By the time the industry reached its economic pinnacle in the early 2000s, CCM artists were portraying normcore American evangelicalism’s conservative social and political commitments as a radical rebellion to mainstream culture (109).
Sometimes Payne’s thorough documentation of the way various themes played out in CCM history gets the reader tripped up in that web of connections. Attending to both thematic and chronological developments sometimes results in sharp and surprising transitions that left me asking for additional dates and signposts to follow the larger thesis. While highly readable, the pace of the prose often feels breathless as there are perhaps too few pages for exploring the many side trails she embarks upon. The book presents the question of what properly fits under the umbrella of “CCM.” Is it simply music for popular consumption? Given its multiple stylistic sub-genres, might it be best understood as the repertory of songs disputed and shaped by Christian parent’s consumption patterns? And what of the emergence (and present-day market dominance) of contemporary worship music (CWM), that is, music for congregational singing that also appears on radio and Spotify playlists? As Payne frames it, CWM is a subgenre in CCM’s history as both a safe alternative to secular popular music and by resuscitating CCM’s early revival spirit. Perhaps these two themes might spur further reflection on CWM’s ecumenical acceptance. In additional to its musical and emotional features, how might CWM also act as a trojan horse for the political and social commitments around which evangelicals, Pentecostals, and charismatics have recently convened?
I would hope that the book does give a good sense of how counter-cultural the original Jesus rock was—a movement that later morphed into CCM. Those artists loved Jesus and refused to kowtow to those who pushed a social, economic or political conservatism. Nothing about them would have felt “safe” to conservative parents, except that many of them had turned from recreational drugs and immoral sex in order to follow Jesus. I was greatly helped in my faith through the ministries of those artists, like Phil Keaggy, Larry Norman, Randy Stonehill, the Way, Resurrection Band, Paul Clark, Daniel Amos, and more.