Jesus Christ Rock Star

Jesus Christ Rock Star/By David W. Stowe, an associate professor of American studies at Michigan State University and the author of No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism

THE NEW YORK TIMES, 24/04/11

The teenage music phenomenon Justin Bieber is arguably the most popular Christian in the world. In interviews he talks about growing up in an evangelical church, about how he prays several times a day, about his belief in angels and his opposition to abortion.

Where you won’t hear Mr. Bieber talk about faith very often, however, is in his songs. That may in part be his choice, but it’s also a reflection of a split in popular music between the secular and the godly. Despite being a rare bright spot in an industry facing difficulties, music with explicit religious content has been largely segregated from non-religious pop music, both in terms of radio stations and audiences — so much so that it even has a name, contemporary Christian music.

This wasn’t always the case. For much of pop music history, religious themes had an uncontroversial place at the top of the charts, a presence most clearly felt in the late ’60s and early ’70s. But over the next decades, the politicization of faith, relying in part on the surge of youth into the country’s churches, turned religious themes into a forbidden zone for secular musicians.

Religious, and especially Christian, themes were common in music throughout the ’60s: early Bob Dylan songs like 1963’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” featured an apocalyptic tone, as did Barry McGuire’s surprise hit “Eve of Destruction” two years later (tellingly, both artists experienced career-changing born-again experiences, Mr. McGuire in 1971 and Mr. Dylan in 1978).

Later in the decade came even more explicit songs, from the Velvet Underground’s “Jesus,” the Byrds’ cover of “Jesus Is Just Alright” and the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ “Oh Happy Day” to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain” and Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.”

Some of these references were tongue in cheek; few signaled a deep theological commitment. Still, it was hard to overlook that Jesus had turned into a highly resonant symbol for many ’60s youth.

Then, at the turn of the decade, the Jesus Movement, that strange and unexpected efflorescence of the ’60s counterculture, burst onto the national radar screen. Though hippie born-agains first appeared in the Bay Area, news media coverage in 1971 focused on Southern California, particularly Orange County’s rapidly growing Calvary Chapel, which sponsored mass baptisms in the surf near Costa Mesa.

Soon young people across the country were tuning in to the Bible and embracing Christ as a kind of hippie forefather who wore long hair and a beard, identified with the have-nots and shook up the Establishment. They gathered in Christian coffeehouses and found shelter and fellowship in Christian group houses that sprang up beside the more numerous hippie communes.

Along with this grassroots religious fervor came an irruption of Jesus into popular music. Released as a double album in 1970, the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” rose to No. 1 and wildcat productions sprang up in advance of its Broadway opening in October 1971. Likewise the musical “Godspell,” written as a master’s thesis, opened off Broadway 40 years ago this May, spawning a soundtrack and spinoff productions around the world. The same month saw the release of Marvin Gaye’s breakthrough concept album, “What’s Going On,” drenched in spiritual themes including references to Jesus.

The Jesus Movement and its music eventually found their way into churches, helping them to rebrand themselves as youth-friendly and relevant, even groovy, attractive to the baby boomers moving out of their youth and into suburban family life. Adapted as congregational “praise music,” the new openness to electric instruments, drums sets and rock sonorities supplanted four-part metrical hymns as the music of Sunday morning worship in an increasing number of churches.

But another trend emerged in the newly invigorated Christian congregations of the 1970s and ’80s. Apart from liturgical innovation, these churches helped incubate — sometimes intentionally, sometimes not — conservative views on emerging culture-war issues like school prayer, abortion, women’s rights, gay marriage and aggressive foreign policy.

Even if many of their members were already inclined toward Republican candidates, the churches often educated and mobilized their flocks, sometimes borrowing organizing techniques pioneered years earlier by the New Left and quite often relying on the motivating power of religious-themed pop music. Indeed, Christian popular music is a critical component in the new conservatism: though Ronald Reagan became its standard-bearer, the movement has been stocked with pop-music-loving Christians, including John Ashcroft, who has written and sung gospel music, and Mike Huckabee, who fronts an oldies band called Capitol Offense.

As contemporary Christian music became more stylistically diverse and commercially savvy, it began to appeal to Generation X and its successors as well, who have grown up singing only contemporary Christian-tinged “praise” music during worship.

The result, however, has been to widen the split between secular and religious music. Since evangelicals could now choose slick, well-produced Christian music from across the spectrum of pop sounds, they had less reason to pay attention to mainstream music. And after 1980, the unmistakable convergence of evangelical Christianity with right-wing politics made “secular” artists more leery of overt religious references that would antagonize most of their core audience.

Interestingly, it’s Lady Gaga who offers a throwback to the less-segregated pop of the past. Her new single, “Judas,” includes the lines: “I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs / Forgive him when his tongue lies through his brain / Even after three times he betrays me / I’ll bring him down … a king with no crown.”

While the song is unlikely to herald an end to the religious/secular rift in pop music, maybe it takes someone as genre-bending as Lady Gaga to bring mainstream pop and Christianity back together