Missional storyteller Jelani Greenidge is a worship pastor with an extensive musical background, including a family heritage of singing gospel and praise-and-worship music. This is the second in a series of essays about the state of Christian music—what’s happening, how things are going, and what we can do about it.
Last week, I made my case that Christian music is (mostly) dead and that to experience its resurrection and rebirth, we need to let go of some outdated or inaccurate paradigms. One of those paradigms says that since God remains the same yesterday, today, and forever, our experiences of God in music should remain the same. While people rarely state this assumption outright, their reactions to changes in Christian music often betray their belief. Many of us, no matter which generational cohort we belong to, have an inherent resistance to change, which often comes out in how we react to Christian music.
With this essay, I examine the current North American music scene and explore how much it differs from how generations of Christians have enjoyed Christian music in the past. (Spoiler alert: Christian music has not remained the same!)
What Christian Music Is For
As Christian music evolved alongside new technologies and cultural shifts, many listeners began to evaluate the value of the music not by its theological richness but by how it made them feel or how closely they could identify with it. Over time, this shifted the role of Christian music from spiritual formation to personal affirmation—raising important questions about what this music is truly for.
This shift led many Christian listeners to adopt the belief that “Christian music is for me.”
In some ways, that’s not inherently bad. Many of us enjoy music as a cultural marker that helps us refine and cultivate our own sense of identity. That’s why teenagers often adopt their own musical tastes as a way to differentiate from (or in some cases, actively rebel against) their parents. Anything that helps a young person find their identity in Christ and live out their faith in an authentic way sounds like a good thing.
But in another sense, this idea gradually curdled and metastasized into something more harmful. In Leah Payne’s history of Christian music, God Gave Rock & Roll to You, she describes it this way:
The history of the CCM charts is a history of how consumers voiced their theological and political opinions unofficially through their buying practices. Year after year, white evangelical denominations and churches published official treatises and position papers and public statements, and all the while, the people who constituted these organizations purchased music that they came to believe represented true Christian life. CCM charts represented rank-and-file white evangelical consensus about what sorts of people evangelicals believed could be credible messengers of the gospel. And the charts displayed what sorts of ideas about God, the world, and the people of God were bankable evangelical theologies. Sometimes these off-the-books ideas aligned with official denominational or congregational teaching; sometimes they did not. Through the market, consumers challenged—and in some cases overturned—the traditional, institutional authority of their pastors, congregations, or denominations.
Jesus Music and the Rise of Becky
The Christian music industry as we (boomers and Gen-Xers) knew it during the ’80s and ’90s was birthed from the Jesus counterculture of the late 1960s and early ’70s. That countercultural emphasis was felt in crossover radio successes like Edwin Hawkins’s “Oh Happy Day” and the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There.” For many Christians, this new wave of music was meant to be listened to, not just performed in live worship spaces. That meant Christian musicians had access to a wider tonal and lyrical palette in crafting songs. It also enabled songs with more melancholy source material to be included in albums alongside more traditional, triumphant-themed praise-and-worship songs, which were then—and still continue to be—more popular in many churches.
Billboard began tracking Christian music for the first time in the 1980s, originally under the title “Best-Selling Inspirational LPs” (LP stood for long-play, one of the many weird standards in the early record industry used to court consumers). As Christian music record labels, radio stations, and other related trade organizations proliferated, this form of music came to be known as contemporary Christian music, or CCM. (A trade group printed a monthly magazine of the same name, thus cementing its usage and popularity.) Eventually, in 2003 and 2005, respectively, Billboard started directly tracking retail purchases of Christian and gospel music sales through the use of Soundscan technology, which was updated in 2013 to include streaming music data through apps like YouTube and Spotify.
All of this granularity resulted in a Nashville-based Christian music machinery that was adept at creating songs that would appeal to their target demographic. And who was their target listener? Eventually, a demographic model emerged: She was a middle-class white evangelical woman, mid-30s or 40s, divorced, drove a minivan, went to church twice a month, and volunteered at a homeless shelter. Executives even gave her a nickname: “Becky.” The mythical Becky was the focus of their targeting because in the ’90s and early 2000s, people like her were controlling the radios during commutes to and from school. If Becky’s kids were listening to Christian music, it was most likely because she bought it on their behalf, probably from a Christian bookstore. She wanted music that was encouraging and uplifting, that made her shimmy her shoulders as she listened behind the desk of her cubicle at work.
As the Christian music industry matured into a multimillion-dollar juggernaut, singers, songwriters, bands, and the music label’s artist-and-repertoire (or A&R) staff that supported them had more and more data available to figure out which kinds of songs would be commercially profitable. At the same time, many leading Christian music brands were purchased by larger media conglomerates, which meant that many of the key decision-makers at these record labels were guided more by market forces than fidelity to Christian spirituality or theology. Over time, these A&R executives exerted significant pressure on artists to make their music as thematically and stylistically appealing as possible to Becky.
Lo-Fi Theology
One huge trend in streaming music currently is “lofi beats.” If you search the internet for that phrase, you’ll get tons of hits for songs, artists, playlists, and even whole YouTube channels dedicated to a subgenre of instrumental music designed to be relaxing, inoffensive, and conducive to focus. It’s music to study to or chill with, and it’s very popular among Gen Z.
“Lo-fi” means low fidelity, the opposite of high fidelity, which was a buzzword used for high-end consumer electronics in the ’80s and ’90s. A hi-fi system gave you an excellent reproduction of the original sound. “Sounds like you’re in the studio,” the marketing copy would read. So “lo-fi” music is made with an audio design aesthetic that intentionally includes glitchy sound artifacts. Some people find this noisy, but a lot of people like it, so much so, it has become its own subgenre.
In Christian music, something similar has happened. Many of us have bought into what I call “lo-fi theology,” or ideas about God that might be culturally relevant or consistent with an ethic of American exceptionalism but exist in low fidelity to the themes, lessons, and ideas about God in the holy Scriptures. That happens in other areas of the church, of course, but it really happens in music. If the music being served to you is already targeted by market forces to match your cultural vision of Christianity and you internalize that music as being representative of the Christian faith as a whole, then it’s a short leap to go from “Christian music is for me,” to, “If it’s not for me, then it must not be Christian.”
As a result, many of us grew up with a limited vision of God’s kingdom. Anyone who spent more time consuming Christian music than reading their Bibles was certainly exposed to biblical texts, but it was probably only the most superficial readings of those texts. They may have heard messages of love, hope, and encouragement, but those were transformed by market forces into neutered affirmations of the status quo, rather than the revolutionary elements of counterculture in which they originated.
For example, it’s easier to say “Jesus is Lord” when we mean it as shorthand for “Oh, I go to church too,” instead of the implied corollary, “And Caesar is not.” It’s easier to love your neighbor when your neighbor looks like you, dresses like you, and shares your taste in music. But when you read Jesus’s parable of the good Samaritan (which was his answer to the question, “Who is my neighbor?”), the hero of that story is just the opposite—someone whose culture Jesus’s audience would have found detestable.
Only a limited understanding of God’s kingdom could compel scenes like those I witnessed in high school and college, where young people sang a chorus derived from the famously prophetic passage from Amos 5:24 (“let justice roll down like mighty waters”) and appeared more excited about mighty waters than about justice itself. I mean, sure, we were at camp and playing in the water is a big part of the appeal. But still…we were missing the whole point. It’s no wonder that, two verses earlier in the text, the same prophet expresses God’s disdain for performative piety, saying, “Away with the noise of your songs.”
Music Listenership in Historical Context
In the grand scope of human history, recorded music is a relatively recent invention. When the gramophone was invented in 1887, two years after the Covenant Church was established, it meant listening to music moved from public spaces into private ones. Prior to that, people enjoyed music by listening to someone playing live.
In 1906, AM radio allowed music and other audio to be broadcast. In the 1930s, FM radio increased sound quality. By the 1980s, the Sony Walkman brought personal listening to the mainstream. Formats evolved: records, cassettes, CDs. Then Napster, the iPod, and now streaming apps like Spotify made music more accessible than ever.
Content Versus Community
So even though we engage music in so many different stylistic, cultural, and technological ways compared with 20 or 30 years ago, this model of Christian music as a marker of cultural identity remains. It shows up in the way the culture of music has been subsumed into the ritualized expressions of social media platforms, where we find our identity in the hashtags, TikToks, and Instagram reels we share with one another.
Contrast this picture of 21st-century market-driven evangelical music with the likely experience of Gregorian or Ambrosian monks chanting antiphons in call and response as part of their daily worship in the ninth and tenth centuries. Their experience would have been embodied and participatory, rather than performative. It was spiritually formative, rather than entertainment. And rather than in isolation, those songs were sung as part of their communal practices, like living and working in proximity to each other.
Do you think Christian music has changed in the last few decades? It’s been changing for centuries. Our music went from something we practiced in community and solidarity to something we performed as entertainment, to something we consume as cultural expression.
“If God remains the same, our music must remain the same.” This paradigm is not only false because music has constantly been changing, but it’s false because God has also been changing us right along with it. God’s essence and character remain consistent over generations, but each new generation experiences a fresh revelation from the Holy Spirit to help us understand when, how, and where God is working in their context. Thus, the way we handle music continues to evolve. Not just the songs themselves, but what we do with them.
In the Covenant, we’re a diverse group of mission friends, immigrant descendants who have been establishing gospel partnerships and relationships across the globe.
So let’s pay attention to what we’re listening to and how it’s shaping us. Let’s resist allowing the algorithm-boosted signals of influencers to set the tone for you and your household. The next time you feel like jamming out to something fun, something good, something spiritual, something “Christian”—ask God to direct your path. Take an active role in looking for tunes that help you along your journey, and see where God leads you. You might be surprised where you end up.
And if you’re tempted to envy your friend’s superior piece of music-related technology, just be glad you’re not listening to a gramophone.
Because those things don’t even have Wi-Fi.
