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This piece was adapted from Russell Moore\u2019s newsletter<\/a>. Subscribe here<\/a>.<\/p>\n A<\/span> friend and I were talking once about the first concerts we ever attended. His was Van Halen; mine was Amy Grant.<\/p>\n \u201cOkay, second concert?\u201d he asked.<\/p>\n Him: M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce. Me: Petra.<\/p>\n After a minute or two of silence, he said, \u201cYou realize we would have hated each other in middle school, don\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n One of us was part of a sheltered subculture quickly passing away. The other listened to music that was a gateway drug to what some say led to riots and rebellion. Turns out, my musical taste, not his, was the dangerous one.<\/p>\n In her new book<\/a>, God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music<\/em>, scholar Leah Payne argues that anyone wishing to understand some of the most epochal shifts in American culture and politics over the past 30 years ought to listen to the radio\u2014specifically to the contemporary Christian music (CCM) genre of a generation of white evangelicals.<\/p>\n Payne writes that teenage kids like me were actually not the market for the CCM industry of the 1980s, 1990s, and early aughts. Our moms were. Payne reveals industry executives even had a collective name for the suburban middle-class mother who sought out Christian alternatives to popular music for her children: \u201cBecky.\u201d<\/p>\n The second avenue was the vibrant youth group culture of the time (where I came to love CCM). Payne writes: \u201cThe quirk of CCM\u2019s business model\u2014that the bulk of its sales came not through mainstream retailers marketing directly to teens, but through Christian bookstores who marketed primarily to evangelical caregivers interested in passing the faith to their children\u2014became its defining characteristic.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem for \u201cBecky,\u201d according to Payne, was that in households where only \u201cChristian music\u201d was allowed, the very way a parent could convince an adolescent that he or she wasn\u2019t missing out on anything became the very problem the caregivers were trying to overcome. Some of these kids, Payne notes, used the CCM comparison charts \u201cto reverse engineer their listening tastes.\u201d She quotes one CCM listener saying, \u201cThe charts said I would like Audio Adrenaline if I liked the Beastie Boys. That\u2019s how I fell in love with the Beastie Boys.\u201d<\/p>\n How does an industry solve that problem? Payne argues that one key way was to convince the Christian kids that they <\/em>were the edgy ones\u2014the non-conforming \u201cJesus Freaks\u201d willing to pray in public and to abstain from sex until marriage. Citing DC Talk\u2019s \u201cJesus Freak<\/a>\u201d music video, Payne writes: \u201cChristian teens who listened to CCM were not just geeky youth-group kids, the video suggested\u2014they were rebels fighting against immoral, oppressive mainstream culture.\u201d<\/p>\n I disagree with her at the margins, here, in that I think \u201cJesus Freak\u201d was well within the bounds of a call for Christian distinctiveness. But Payne is certainly correct that an entire genre of songs went beyond this to suggest that the kid who feels made fun of for attending a See You At The Pole prayer event is being persecuted by a hostile culture in almost the same way as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.<\/p>\n Should conservative Protestant teenagers and college students be rightly equipped for the fact that they will be out of step with their peers in modern American culture? Yes.<\/p>\n The problem, though, is that Augustine\u2019s City of God <\/em>would not sell very well in a 20th- or 21st-century American Christian market. The nuanced truth that \u201cYou will be made to feel strange at times for following Christ, but you\u2019re not under persecution (and, by the way, you\u2019re not nearly strange enough <\/em>in the ways Jesus actually called you to be)\u201d isn\u2019t nearly as exciting as, \u201cThis is the terminal generation. The elites are out to destroy you, and you are the only thing standing between Christian America and the New World Order.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGod wants what you want (for you to be happy and healthy and flush with cash)\u201d sells. So does \u201cYou\u2019re the real America and everybody else wants to kill you.\u201d Messages of actual cross-bearing and a cruciform life, however, do not sell well at all.<\/p>\n In Payne\u2019s analysis, the business model of CCM looked to the marketplace \u201cfor signs of God\u2019s work in the world,\u201d with the top-selling artists and products reflecting \u201ca consensus among consumers about what constituted right Christian teaching about God, the people of God, and their place in public life. Certain ideas thrived in large part because they appealed to white evangelical consumers. Other ideas faltered because they could not easily be sold.\u201d<\/p>\n To some degree, that\u2019s to be expected. The music business is, after all, a business<\/em>. But, as Payne points out, some reformers (including my now CT colleague Charlie Peacock<\/a>) warned of ways the business model could be at cross purposes with the teaching power of music\u2014and many artists (such as the late Rich Mullins and Michael Card) charted a different, more theologically grounded and biblically holistic course.<\/p>\n