The Genesis of Jesus Rock: An Interview with David W. Stowe

Randall Stephens

David W. Stowe is a professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He has written on jazz history, hymns, and rock music. Stowe is the author of a wide range of books and articles, including Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Harvard University Press, 1996); How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard University Press, 2004); and, most recently, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Below I interview Stowe about his excellent new book and his insights into Jesus rock and the culture of conservative evangelicalism.

Randall Stephens: What drew you to the topic of the roots of Christian rock?

David W. Stowe: I was intrigued by the historical moment of the early Seventies—1971 to be exact—when it seemed popular music and youth culture were saturated in allusions to Jesus Christ: Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, several Top 40 songs with Jesus in their titles or verses. Why had the Son of God seemingly taken over U.S. popular culture at just that moment—when the countercultural energies of the Sixties were metamorphosing into something new? And did this music play some role in reshaping American culture during the Age of Reagan and beyond?

These struck me as questions worth trying to answer. There was a personal angle as well. I came of age during the Seventies and have always been fascinated by that decade, which I remember now as if it were some kind of dream. So Christian pop music—of which I was completely oblivious until about 15 years ago—was a lens through which to make sense of that strange interlude between Kent State and the Reagan Revolution.

Stephens: Why did a Christian analogue to rock music develop when and where it did?

Stowe: Like many forms of the Sixties counterculture, Christian rock first emerged in California. More precisely Orange County, the epicenter of what was dubbed the Jesus Movement. It was at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa where Chuck Smith famously teamed up with über-Jesus freak Lonnie Frisbee. Larry Norman came out of the Bay Area and had a major impact as well. But it’s important to note that the West Coast didn’t have a monopoly on Jesus music. The Rez Band (still in business) originated in

Milwaukee and made a very successful debut run across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. CCM guitar hero Phil Keaggy did a stint at Love Inn in upstate New York. [Check out the McCartney, Ram-esque Keaggy song in the youtube clip here.] So this Jesus Movement—and the music that went with it—was a national phenomenon.

Stephens: You focus quite a bit of attention on apocalypticism. How did end-times views shape Christian rock and, even, politics?

Stowe: Apocalyptic themes had bounced around in American pop music since early Dylan—“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—and Barry McGuire’s surprise number-one hit of 1965, “Eve of Destruction.” A sense of living in end times tinged the late Sixties counterculture—a certain Cold War fatalism permeated American society for decades--so it made sense that an apocalyptic mindset would filter into the Jesus Movement. Among other things, it makes a catchy theme for a lyric. Witness Larry Norman’s most famous song: “Children died, the days grew cold/A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold/I wish we’d all been ready. . . .”

It didn’t hurt that these messages were being reinforced by the best-selling book of the seventies, Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth. Politically, end-times prophecy tends to work against social and political movements, reformist or revolutionary. What’s the point of transforming the world if God is going to bring the curtain down on the whole sorry human enterprise? So most of the Jesus Freaks—and the musicians they listened to—focused on saving as many souls as they could before the Rapture.

Stephens: By concentrating on artists who were crossover, or more mainstream performers—like Al Green, Bob Dylan, and Aretha Franklin—you extend what most people might think of as Christian music or Christian rock. I wonder if you might say something about the tensions that existed between those who reached a larger, mainstream market and those who were fairly fixed within the Christian genre.

Stowe: This tension was one of the most intriguing aspects of the Christian pop phenomenon. On the one hand, the Jesus Movement tried to cast a wide net and welcome as diverse a following as possible. On the other hand, its theology was quite orthodox. There was a deep suspicion of alternate spiritualities of the kind that were floating around pop music especially after the Beatles went off to the Maharishi’s ashram at Rishikesh. Many of the decade’s most successful artists, whose music invoked religious and Christian themes—the ones you’ve mentioned, but also Marvin Gaye, Earth Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, even Johnny Cash—weren’t embraced by the Jesus Movement. Jesus freaks pretty much ignored them. From a broader historical perspective, though, it was important to make sense of their relation to the baby boom evangelicals who were cutting their spiritual teeth in those years.

Stephens: Could you describe how you think Christian rock has changed since its early days in the late 1960s and early 1970s?

Stowe: It’s become both much more commercially slick and much more musically diverse. In the early days, Christian rock was mostly folk-rock, or just plain folk. Even hard rock was a bit of a stretch. Now one can find every genre of pop music represented in CCM: hardcore, hip-hop, punk, Goth, Norwegian death metal. CCM is now a very large and profitable market genre—outselling jazz and classical combined—so the promotion and production value of the music has gone way up. It’s theology tends to be much more eclectic as well. As I argued in the New York Times last spring, the innocently promiscuous mixing of Christian language in “secular” music doesn’t happen as it did during the early years of Christian rock; the secular/sacred divide seems to have hardened. Although, as is always the case when generalizing about a huge diverse culture form like popular music, important exceptions can be found.

Stephens: What projects are you currently working on?

Stowe: A short book on the varied forms Psalm 137 has taken in North America. That’s the one that begins, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. . . . How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” I call it American’s longest-running protest song. Its history stretches from the earliest Pilgrim psalters through adaptation to the American Revolution, abolitionist movement, Harlem Renaissance, civil rights movement, and the widely covered reggae version, “Rivers of Babylon.” It’s a good lens for thinking about the varied social and political uses to which a thirteen-verse Hebrew poem can be put, and the endless inventiveness of music to wrap itself around ideology.

Mosh If You Love Jesus: Guest Post

The guest post today is from FSU graduate student Charlie McCrary on the anniversary of Stryper's To Hell with the Devil, a controversial Christian metal band. Charlie's most recent post for us reflected on Ron Bell and emergent theology.

Mosh if You Love Jesus: An Introduction to Christian Metal

Charlie McCrary

This October 24^th marks the 25^th anniversary of the release of Christian glam-metal band Stryper’s To Hell with the Devil, an album that sold over one-million copies and controversially toed the line between Jesus’ and the devil’s music. A quarter-century later, aided by the Internet and the rising popularity of heavy music, the Christian hardcore/metal scene has exploded. For young people across the United States and the world, hardcore dancing, screaming, and moshing are considered genuine forms of worship. But what does the Christian metal scene look like—and what can it tell us about American evangelical youth culture? A brief survey of today’s Christian metal scene will bring us to at least one conclusion: it’s come a long way from yellow Spandex.

Metal is intense. Nothing about the music or the environment is relaxed. Members of heavy music scenes subscribe disproportionately to extreme lifestyle choices, such as straight-edge or veganism. Oddly enough, this atmosphere of extremism is ripe for evangelical fervor. The type of Christianity preached at Christian metal shows is not of the “lukewarm” variety. Enthusiastic, emotional, radical conversions and rededications are encouraged. A “Spirit-filled” circle pit isn’t entirely unlike, say, Cane Ridge. The evangelical hotbed that is the Christian metal scene subverts some stylistic tendencies of conservative evangelicals yet zealously champions familiar theological, practical, and ideological foundations.

Militarism, violence, and apocalypticism all have their place in American evangelical communities, perhaps nowhere more so than in the Christian metal scene. While apocalyptic themes are standard fare in metal lyrics in general, many Christian metal bands practically sound the seventh trumpet before every breakdown. Along with this focus on the apocalypse—which may be emphasized for the aesthetic qualities of the violent imagery of battle—comes the urgency to repent, accept Jesus as one’s savior, and not be left behind. Thus, because the end is immanent, evangelic efforts are aggressive and exigent, and bands like For Today not only fervently seek conversions, but then also set up Bible study networks in each tour city to ensure that newly-“saved” people can maintain Christian practice and “stay strong.” This battle imagery applies not just to the end times or apocalypse

For the Christian metal scene, as for many evangelicals, the entire world is understood in dichotomous relationships—between spirit and flesh, God and the devil, the “things of God” and “the world.” Many lyrics employ the sense that life itself is a sort of battle to be won or lost. See, for example, Haste the Day’s “When Everything Falls” (“I will stand when everything falls away. I will fight this war forever or until I die”), War of Ages’ “Battle On” (“Now that our time is near we hold our own until the end/Fight with every breath without doubt and don't look back/We fight for the Truth”), or For Today’s “Infantry” (“This world will do anything to release its demons at all costs. We'll fight back with all we have, making a difference for our God”). Battles and struggles are constant within the lyrics and messages of Christian metal. Though the battles referred to are often the real, cosmic battles that will in fact take place someday at the end of the world, just as often, they are the everyday struggles commonly experienced and discussed by evangelicals. From struggles with lust (see For Today’s “Redemption”) to the difficulty of fully trusting God (see A Plea for Purging’s “The New Born Wonder”), these lyrics express common evangelical frustrations and problems with typical evangelical language.

Christian metal also falls into line with conservative evangelicalism in its biblicism. Bible verses are frequently quoted in lyrics, and biblical themes and characters are often evoked as a way of meaning-making as well as legitimizing authority. Consider a few brief, fascinating examples. For Today’s 2009 album Portraits features a “portrait” of a biblical character in each song—such as Joel (The Watchman) or Ezekiel (The Visionary)—which serves not only as a Bible lesson but as a way of connecting the evangelical goals and mission of the band with biblical justifications and/or imperatives. In this same way, the now-defunct band Blessed is He drew authority from biblical sources, explicitly making this connection in the song, whose title comes from 1 Corinthians, “I Become One to Win One” with these lyrics: “I have become all things to all people—like Paul said—that I may by all means save some.” In doing so, they relate their sense of purpose while simultaneously silencing via proof-text evangelical doubters who may consider their lifestyle or appearance incongruent with Christianity.

The experience of a Christian metal show is in many ways just like that of any other metal or hardcore show: mosh pits, hardcore dancing, stage dives, headbanging, etc. It is violent, sweaty, intense, and male-dominated, yet at the same time fosters a sense of community and trust (see this video). Metal shows encourage audience participation, so much so that the audience becomes part of the performance. This is exactly the function of many rituals in typically “religious” settings. An atmosphere of solidarity is often created, which lends itself brilliantly not only to audience participating (moshing as a form of worship) but also to receptivity to preaching. Many bands, operative as sweaty, tattooed versions of Billy Graham, devote the final minutes of their set to a passionate plea for their audience to “know Christ.” The metal stage can transform to a pulpit, providing a platform for everything from sermons on manhood to personal testimonies to calls to action to corporate prayer. Some bands even blend Contemporary Christian Music and “praise and worship” genres into their set, as demonstrated in this live performance by Sleeping Giant.

As the idea of metal and hardcore as “acceptable” styles of Christian music (or even worship) becomes more widely affirmed, the Christian metal scene will likely continue to grow. Christian metal has been successful because of its fidelity both to the metal scene and to conservative evangelical principles. In doing so, it provides an outlet for evangelical youths who are drawn to metal but seek a “positive” environment. Additionally—and, in the minds of all involved, more importantly—Christian metal functions as an evangelistic tool, an inroad into a somewhat “unreached” community and an opportunity to “shine light” into the “darkest corners” of American youth culture.

Conveying Joseph Smith: Brandon Flowers, Arthur Kane, and the Mormon Rock Star Image

Christopher Jones

(cross-posted at Juvenile Instructor)

While pundits and theologians continue the seemingly endless debate over whether or not Mormonism is Christian/Mormons are Christians/a Mormon can be a Christian, over at Slate, browbeat writer David Haglund weighs in on the Mormon church's latest advertising campaign (the "I'm a Mormon" campaign) and the recent participation of The Killers frontman and international rockstar Brandon Flowers in that effort:

The video hews closely to the campaign's usual formula: Flowers talks about himself, then about his values, and then he connects those values to his Mormon faith. Near the end, Flowers talks a bit about his public persona. "A lot of people love to come up to me and tell me they were raised in the church," Flowers says, "and they expect there to be this camaraderie of, oh, we've outgrown it now, we're smart enough now not to be in it." One can understand why this would happen: In 2004, Spin identified Flowers as an ex-Mormon, and he has been candid in the past about his drinking and smoking, activities forbidden for devout members of the Mormon church. 

But as the existence of this video suggests, Flowers doesn't see himself as an ex-Mormon, at least not anymore. (If he did, he could have participated in a different video campaign.) What's interesting about this is the way Flowers frames his re-affirmed faith: "I was raised in it," he says, "and I still... it's..." He chuckles. "There's still a fire burning in there." That's the last thing he says before the more standard send-off: "I'm a father, and I'm a husband, and I'm a Mormon."

For those, like myself, interested in Mormon conversion narratives (as well as unexpectedly Mormon musicians), there's a lot to unpack here; I'm especially intrigued by the centrality to his faith of his roles as husband and father. (As an aside, the entire corpus of videos available at mormon.org as part of the ad campaign presents a wealth of primary source material for researchers interested in the lives and stories of everyday Mormons today. They strike me as a 21st century equivalent to the personal narratives and life stories of committed Christians that populated the pages of denominational periodicals of yesteryear).

But Flowers's recent offering at mormon.org is not an isolated example of him speaking out about his faith. In addition to the numerous interviews and articles in which he's affirmed his Mormonism over the years, his music has long been heavy on religious themes---from the redemptive pleadings and catchy chorus ("I've got soul but I'm not a soldier") of "All These Things that I've Done" to "When You Were Young," which Flowers once explained was "about growing up in a religion where Jesus is considered a saviour and also realising people can be saviours, too, whether they be your wife, your best friend or your next-door neighbour. He can come in other human forms." Perhaps the most striking nod to his Mormonism, though, comes in the music video for the second single released on his debut solo album, Flamingo---"Only the Young." Filmed in a darkened and otherwise empty theater in Las Vegas, Flowers performs on stage, surrounded by angelic figures descending from a bright light overhead. To anyone familiar with Joseph Smith's first vision, in which Smith recalled being visited by God the Father and Jesus Christ accompanied by "many angels," the imagery is obvious. But just in case it was missed, Flowers then mimics the pose often portrayed in illustrations of Smith as the divine light descends upon him (all while singing about the innocence and potential of youth to "break away" and discover the Sun, which will surely "shine again").

Flowers's story immediately brought to my mind another Mormon rockstar---coincidentally nicknamed "Killer"---Arthur Kane, the now deceased bassist of the 1970s glam rock and proto-punk band, the New York Dolls, whose post-rockstar career, conversion to Mormonism, and brief reunion with his former bandmates was chronicled in the excellent 2005 documentary, New York Doll. Comparing the two personal narratives provides occasional contrasts---whereas Flowers explains that his renewed commitment to Mormonism means that his faith and family has now "surpassed the music now, for me" in importance, Kane's faith famously found expression in his continual prayers asking for God's help in reuniting the estranged New York Dolls one final time. Yet in other respects, the two resemble one another, particularly in their visual invocation of Mormonism's founding prophet. For the Dolls' 2004 reunion show in London, Kane insisted on wearing "a white ruffly shirt and black leather pants." While such a wardrobe might bring to mind Jerry Seinfeld before anyone else, in Kane's mind it was intended to "convey a Joseph Smith kind of image."

I'm not entirely sure what conclusions can be drawn from these parallel examples, but I doubt Mormonism's musician par-excellence of the 19th century, W.W. Phelps, had anything like this in mind when he eulogized the deceased Mormon prophet by prophesying in verse that "millions shall know Brother Joseph again!"

Adventures in “Christian” Retail: Part II

by Charity R. Carney

As DEG mentioned in a comment on my last post "Adventures in 'Christian' Retail, Part I," he’s going to be providing some expert commentary as I continue with my installments from my experiences this summer working for a Christian-run retail chain. So look for Darren Grem’s follow-up!

Update: Part III, the finale of Charity's series, is here. Extended responses informed from his own academic work on capitalism and American Christianity, from Darren Grem, are here and here.

Muzak. Bad muzak, but also an excellent indicator of the spiritual/secular influences on (what I’m teasingly calling) “Christian Chain” (CC). One of the things that customers constantly complement store management on is the “acoustic” music that streams incessantly over the speakers in the store. They say that it is soothing and that its Christian message is something that keeps them in the store and also keeps them coming back. It’s a very clever marketing gimmick, ultimately. But there are a few surprises that I encountered when I listened a bit more closely to what consumers were actually ingesting on their visits to CC.

Most obviously, the store pipes in the now-common coinciding traditional hymn and praise music combo that many churches have incorporated into their repertoire. Contemporary praise and worship has become so commonplace that many song melodies are as recognizable as Wesley’s hymns. While “Amazing Grace” is a muzak mainstay, so are songs like “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever,” “Our God is an Awesome God,” “Father I Adore You,” “Tear Down the Walls.” Hillsong United, Integrity Music, and other major praise and worship companies have obviously cooperated with CC to provide some of their more widely used songs in instrumental versions. They are pumped through a station at some headquarters whereby shoppers and employees at all of CC stores will have a uniform muzakal experience. It’s a strange collective experience, especially as the hours in your 12-16 hour shift wear on and “Above All” is ringing in your ears for the seventeenth time (no bitterness here, no sir--and more on the shifts and work schedules as well as my current dealings with OSHA in the next post).

What strikes me as interesting is that by making the music muzak, instrumental by nature, CC is relying on the customers’ knowledge of Christian music and the familiarity of the melodies to the general public (or at least the public that they are serving). They are also probably avoiding a ton of royalty fees, but Darren will certainly be able to better speak to that issue. But what they also do is reveal the secular nature of CC’s commercialism. In addition to Christian-themed music, the stores also have an odd array of non-Christian songs (in fact, some songs used are by nature not conservative or Christian at all). This fact first struck me as I was stocking merchandise and immediately recognized the butchered version of “Imagine” that suddenly began playing over the loudspeakers. “Imagine”? “Imagine no religion”? When I finished my task and returned to my department I asked another employee about the song--how could this store be playing that song (as happy as I was to hear it and for the respite from “Awesome God”)? I was confronted by a very defensive fellow worker who explained to me that “Imagine” is a Christian song and that John Lennon and the Beatles were all Christians. I tried to throw down some pop culture knowledge but eventually gave up and logged the event as singular. Maybe the higher-ups are under the same impression and honestly believe that “Imagine” is a Christian tune. Whatever. But it did make me listen a little more carefully to the muzak from then on and I discovered that the instrumentals that the customers so loved because of the Christian inspiration they received while shopping (no irony, none at all) did not adhere to any real ideology or logic whatsoever. Rod Stewart, Sting, John Mayer (“Your Body is a Wonderland”), all showed up in their repertoire. The Beatles are a favorite.

My sense is that as long as the tune is registered by the typical consumer’s ear as something that they know, that’s how it made the cut. So praise and worship and traditional hymns are recognizable, just like “Imagine” and “Broken Arrow.” In other words, commerce is king in the CC muzak department.

“Sick of Your Dancing, Sick of Your Chanting”: Shannon and the Clams, Indonesian Throat Singing, and Emotive Religion

by Charity Carney

My husband and I celebrated our second anniversary in San Francisco last week and discovered that Oakland can be awesome. It’s produced one of the most interesting music scenes on the West Coast in my estimation, with Berkeley radio pumping out track after track of whacked-out punk rock (like Hunx and the Punx) as well as some interesting international music. Other stations in the area seem bound to the round-the-clock beach music or CCR, but 90.2 FM is taking risks and putting out sounds that are at once seemingly disjointed but also deeply connected in the sources that they tap.

Two songs (Shannon and the Clams’ “The Cult Song” and a track from Arrington De Dionyso’s “Malaikat Dan Singa”) immediately followed each other on the station and served as the impetus for a new masculinity post. Crazy, but true. Shannon and the Clams are an Oakland-based group that blend Buddy Holly with the Ramones with a girl-group vibe. Their “The Cult Song” can be heard here. The lyrics reference some of the most infamous moments in American cult history (“sick of your Nikes, sick of your Kool-Aid”) and declare a defiance of radical religion. At the same time, the chorus includes a chanting “ooga booga” background that is some sort of cartoonish impression of stereotyped African religious intonations. It’s a mish mash of racism, rejection of religion, and female empowerment, with the female lead vocalist repeating “I Don’t Wanna Be in Your Cult No More!”

Backed up next to this track was Arrington De Dionyso’s throat singing—not an Oakland product but shipped in from Indonesia. “Malaikat Dan Singa” is an example of this rather dark spiritual vocal styling and the video for it (watch it here) includes imagery of an art gallery with the artist drawing figures of women and men that are sexually charged and bizarrely childish and violent. The music is connected to De Dionyso’s past band (aptly titled “Old Time Relijun”) that was rooted in “shapeshifting, shamanic practices, animal possession, and magnetism” (according to this excellent article at Tiny Mix Tapes) and this new record continues to follow these spiritual obsessions, with de Dionyso blaring out the Indonesian words in a deep, masculine, trance-like drone.

What came to mind as I listened to these two tracks was the power of spiritual emoting and the gendered differences that exist in various cultures and religious groups when it comes to evoking religious feelings/power. The Indonesian throat singer has no hesitation in his voice as he forces the notes out of his throat, almost sounding like he’s ripping his vocal chords to shreds. Shannon (and her Clams) give us another sense of spiritual power—they remind us of the male-led cults of the 20^th century United States. Even as the song rejects these movements, it also uses them and forces us to collectively remember the pop power of these radical religious groups. I see in both songs and both traditions (if I can use that to describe the American cult tradition) the tendency for masculine control of many spiritual practices and the feminine following of male religious leaders. I also see a disturbing connection that the radio station may or may not have meant to make between cults and Indonesian religious practices. The “ooga boogas” mock “Malaikat Dan Singa” in a way and force a connection where there was not one in the first place.

Blessed with a Dark Turn of Mind: Gillian Welch's Spiritual Strivings

Paul Harvey

A few days ago I blogged a bit about Reinhold

Niebuhr and Gillian Welch, an unlikely but (in my view) apt combination of theologian and performing artist. In this short essay for Religion Dispatches, I develop my thoughts about her newest recording (and some of her previous recordings) at greater length, focusing especially on her musical relationship to the "hard religion" of the rural South whose music she recreates, rejuvenates, and reinterprets. We here at the blog await word from her publicist about the possibility of an email interview, but suffice to say if that happens (big if there) it will be awesome!!!! Scroll down a bit for a live performance of one of the tunes from the record.

Update! Alec Wilkinson for the New Yorker makes many similar points about the record, in this piece just out for the magazine. Cool, but I wrote mine early last week, so feeling ahead of the curve, even if I do live in a flyover state and famously conservative city!

A brief excerpt from the piece, and then follow the rest at the link:

“It is the best kind of record: one that lures you in and soothes you with harmonies and banjo, only to leave you wondering what the hell just happened.”
—Kitty Empire, review of The Harrow & the Harvest in The Observer, June 26, 2011

That’s a good question to ask of someone who sings of spending seven years with her companion

on the burning shore, with Gatling guns and paint,
working the lowlands door to door, like a Latter-day Saint.

And that’s before she’s turned out at the top of the stairs, by someone who took all the glory,that you just couldn’t share. Welch and her partner David Rawlings sing in haunting union:

I’ve never been so disabused, never been so mad
I’ve never been served anything that tasted so bad.

Listening to this song, “The Way It Will Be,” I too don’t know what the hell just happened, but it’s impossible not to complete the story, to fill in those gaps. We’ve all eaten that bitterness at some point. And that urge to figure out the details in the mysteriously unsettling story comes wrapped here in religiously-tinged narratives and imagery that historically have received their richest expression in the musical culture of the American South.

Welch’s Southern characters, though, emerge not from some imaginary version of God, country, and family, but from the spiritual strivings of folk who have seen plenty of hard times.

Continue . . . .

Here's a clip from one tune, "The Way It Goes," performed recently:

Our Great Pantheist Epic

Paul Harvey

Here's a belated 4th of July post -- little power outage around here cut off my internet access so we're a little behind on posting. Anyway, in honor of the 4th, what better than Bruce Springsteen doing "This Land Is Your Land," the-song-that-should-be-our-national-anthem. "America the Beautiful" would also be a great national anthem, especially since it was inspired by my local landmark Pike's Peak, honors land, and the latter verses hail both "liberty" and "law." Either one of those would be great, and I'd put my hand over heart every time -- just ANYTHING but the unsingable, militaristic, bombast/drinking song we're stuck with presently.

In case you don't know, "This Land Is Your Land" was written as Woody Guthrie's angry response to the treacly patriotism of "God Bless America." Even Carl Lewis, who famously butchered our hideous national anthem, can sing "This Land."

And this one's for you too, Professor Fea. And for our national parks, under significant threats according to a just-released report which also recommends a number of actions to forestall their possible decline.

Hard Times Ain't Gonna Rule My Mind

Paul Harvey

What do Reinhold Niebuhr and Gillian Welch/David Rawlings have to do with each other? Nothing, you say, and that would be correct; everything, I say, and that's probably a stretch to say the least, but it's a reflection that came this morning reading/listening to two entirely unrelated pieces (update: now, three pieces, see the update below).

In "Religious Realism," over at The Book, Alan Wolfe reviews Why Niebuhr Now?, a posthumuously published work by the intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins. Wolfe provides a thoughtful review both of the book's strengths and weaknesses, as well as a nice short examination of Niebuhr himself, including a couple of sentences related to the subject to come shortly: "Niebuhr was of course serious, at times ponderous, himself. Yet he consistently warned against the kind of seriousness that dismisses the ironies inherent in human existence."

I happened to be reading that while listening to The Harrow and the Harvest, the new and long-awaited recording by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings -- you can listen to it in full (for the next couple of weeks or so, I think), here, courtesy of NPR Music (big HT to Deg for pointing me there).

Welch's musical persona always has been inspired by the kinds of struggles, personal journeys, dreams, and frustrated longings of characters that seem to step from the interwar years, updated a bit sometimes but carrying the kind of message and leading the kinds of lives of people that Reinhold Niebuhr's southern-born students (including Howard Kester and many others) and their comrades and co-workers (including Claude Williams and Owen Whitefield, discussed at full length in Jarod Roll and Erik Gellman's new book The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America) worked and lived among during some of the tougher years of the twentieth century. Heath will be posting a full-length interview with the authors of that book soon, so stay tuned for that.

"Hard times ain't gonna rule my mind," Gillian Welch sings, reflecting the characteristic determination of her song-characters to survive the vicissitudes that befall them, both those dictated by fate and those they bring on themselves. These are stories of American religious realism, in this case perhaps more personal and less archetypical or self-consciously mythical than in some of her previous records. At their best, the songs poignantly reflect on the ironies inherent in human existence.

UPDATE: Jim Sleeper of Yale University sent me his review of the same book by Diggins, about Niebuhr, which just confirmed the conclusions I reached above about Niebuhr's theology as lived out in the characters in Welch's songs. More than a simple review, Sleeper's short piece aptly summarizes some of the most important conclusions Niebuhr reached in his work, and how they apply today. As Sleeper explains:

The faith, although Christic and biblical, turned paradoxically on humans’ experience not of God’s presence, but of his absence. Niebuhr’s “religious vocation was to doubt religious certainty,” as Diggins puts it: “Genuine religion is always a struggle between belief and unbelief.”

That struggle is inevitable, Niebuhr held, because, on the one hand, our individual finitude and mortality make us experience the wonder, love, and yearning that generate religion, art, and compassion. On the other hand, because we’re limited and doomed as creatures, we’re also willfully or wistfully doomed as creators, with no external vantage points or leverage on history. That predicament generates incessant flights into illusory self-importance, power, omniscience, and material security—and therefore into idolatries of rugged individualism, liberal universal nationalism, the invisible hand, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the global village, and techno-nirvana.

As Welch sings, "the Great Destroyer sleeps in every man."

Rejoice and Shout: A Journey through Gospel Music History

Paul Harvey

The new documentary Rejoice and Shout premieres this week. It’s a documentary featuring black gospel performances over a full century, from the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet in 1902 to some contemporary stars. The film has gotten a lot of nice write-ups; the link takes you to the film's website, where you can learn more about it. Here in flyover land probably will have to wait until it moves from the “save” to the “queue” part of my Netflix list. A little bit from the NPR segment on the documentary:

Director Don McGlynn, a veteran of the music documentary genre, wanted to trace gospel from its earliest roots to its current incarnation in the music world. The film even plays the first known recording of gospel music, a record made in 1902 by the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet.

The New York Times published a substantial review of the film here; a little excerpt:

This historical survey of the genre draws heavily on the extensive archives of its producer, Joe Lauro, and is grounded in the work of two experts: Anthony Heilbut, who wrote the classic book “The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times,” and Bil Carpenter, whose “Uncloudy Days: The Gospel Music Encyclopedia” chronicles the lives and careers of more than 650 gospel figures. Their analyses are supplemented by the observations of Jacquie Gales Webb, the host of a popular radio program. Mr. Heilbut’s approach is primarily scholarly and historical, and Mr. Carpenter’s is more sociological and political. Smokey Robinson, who introduces the film and offers its closing observations, sets its praiseworthy tone

If anyone wants to read the whole review but is shout out by the Times firewall, let me know and I’ll send to you.

I will be interested to see how it compares to my recent favorite in the genre of gospel documentaries, How Sweet It Was: The Sights and Sounds of Gospel’s Golden Age. This one comes as a documentary and a CD, and it features some astounding older clips; the DVD is basically a strung-together version of those full clips, so not really a “documentary” but more of a compilation. Anyway, I’m looking forward to Rejoice and Shout; if anyone reading this living around a real city gets a chance to watch it, feel free to post your thoughts here.

While you're waiting to see Rejoice and Shout, here's a great clip on Youtube that can be seen in its entirety on How Sweet it Was, for your enjoyment: The Meditation Singers doing "Sanctified Lord."

Ain't No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Claude Ely

Paul Harvey

Here's a great radio story, courtesy of Radio Diaries and NPR, about the Rev. Claude Ely, Holiness/Pentecostal exhorter and singer from Kentucky and author of the classic "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down." Johnny Cash's recording of the song just before he died, and a huge internet mashup done to that recording, was the subject of a post of mine some time ago. A brief excerpt from the transcript of the radio show:

People would show up to revivals because they had heard about this country singer who sang like a black man. Brother Claude Ely would thrash his guitar, shake and gyrate from one part of the stage to the other. Young men would run up to wipe the sweat off his forehead.

Gladys Presley, Elvis' mother, was a fan of Brother Claude Ely's ministry, and some people remember Gladys and Elvis getting blessed at Brother Claude Ely tent revivals while Brother Claude Ely laid hands on them and prayed for them.

This story comes from the efforts of Macel Ely, Brother Claude's nephew, who encountered his uncle's music while traveling in Europe, and wondered how it found its way there. Evidently he is producing a full-length documentary on the subject. You can hear Ely's rendition of his song along with some photos here, and a CD compilation of Claude can be found here.

A final note: somehow those who prattle on about NPR's "liberal bias" somehow never get around to talking about stories like these, which took up most of the last segment of yesterday's show from that dreaded bastion of left-wing propaganda, All Things Considered -- never mind all the locally produced reporting such as the programs about Colorado which I have written about here, and the programs about the Ozarks which John Schmalzbauer has written about for Immanent Frame here.

Here's some more information on Macel Ely's book which came from his efforts to find out about his uncle's widespread influence, Ain't No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely (published by the wonderful Atlanta outfit Dust-to-Digital, compiler and publisher of the peerless six-CD set Goodbye, Babylon, and many other musical classics).

Ain’t No Grave: The Life and Legacy of Brother Claude Ely is written as an oral, biographical history taken from the recorded interviews of more than 1,000 people in the Appalachian Mountains who knew Brother Claude Ely. Coined as the King Recording Label’s “Gospel Ranger,” Brother Claude Ely was well-known and loved by many in the earlier part of the 20th century as both a religious singer-songwriter and a Pentecostal-Holiness preacher. Few people, however, knew the personal details of his childhood, military service, and years of hard work in the coal fields of southwestern Virginia.

Now, decades after his legendary death, many fans still seem mesmerized and touched by this humble man’s quick wit and sincere desire to share the Gospel’s “Good News” with everyone who would listen to his message of hope and love. Having received popularity for his song, “There Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down,” Brother Claude Ely passed along a musical and spiritual influence which can still be heard today like a mountain echo in those long, winding hollows and impoverished coal fields. Hollywood and the “King of Rock and Roll” also later acknowledged their admiration for and fascination with the late Brother Claude Ely. This book chronicles the life of one man who made an eternal impact on thousands of Appalachian dwellers. His simple sermons and folkloric songs are still providing assurance, hope, and faith to many mountain people

New York Rock Star Jesus Christ Opens Gates to Heaven

Paul Harvey

Today's NY Times features a cornucopia of religion for your Easter

Sunday. To start, our new contributor David Stowe's "Jesus Christ, Rock Star," looks at why religion was once part of popular music, how the divide between "rock" and "Christian" music happened, and why that divide may be in the process of lessening (plus just for fun a link accompanying the article takes you to Barry McGuire's Eve of Destruction, a song that opens Todd Gitlin's capacious survey The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage):

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.

Then you can hop over to John Leland (great name!), "The Evangelical Squad," which looks at evangelical entrepreneurs in some unlikely places in the NYC area, including the East Village. A brief excerpt, with a nod to Tony Carnes's Journey through NYC Religions which we blogged about here before:

But the church and its expansion into the East Village highlight a concerted groundswell of middle-class, professional evangelicals in Manhattan, an area many churches once shunned as an epicenter of sin. It is the place, many now believe, to reach the people who influence the world.

Though much attention has been paid to New York’s boom in immigrant churches, in recent decades the number of English-speaking evangelical churches south of Harlem has grown tenfold, to more than 100, said Tony Carnes, a researcher and founder of the online journal A Journey Through NYC Religions, who has studied New York churches since the 1970s. Without fanfare, the newcomers have created networks to pay for new churches and to form church-planting incubators, treating the city as a mission field.

"Because the institutions are new, Mr Carnes added, the city has become “like a Silicon Valley of church-planting. “You can come here, try new ideas, fail and start again,” he said. “It’s a hot area where failure isn’t a disgrace.”

Finally, our good friend Lauren Winner appears in the Book Review section, reflecting on all the recent brouhaha over Rob Bell's Love Wins. She writes of the long-lived yin-and-yang of exclusivity versus universalism in evangelical thought, including in the nineteenth century with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar.

Lauren concludes:

So, too, Rob Bell is articulating the concerns of a generation of Christians schooled in toleration, whose neighbors and coworkers and siblings are Muslim or Buddhist or agnostic, a generation whose pluralist social commitments are at odds with theological commitments to limited salvation. Bell speaks for those Christians who take the Bible seriously but can’t imagine their secular friends aren’t going to heaven, too. He speaks for that woman in the pew who can’t bear the thought of spending eternity apart from her atheist brother. The tweeting gatekeepers of conservative evangelicalism may also share these concerns, but for them, the solution is to convert the unbelieving neighbor.

Lady Godga's Judas, Just in Time for Easter

What better than a little Lady Gaga for Easter? Welcome below our first contribution from new contributor David Stowe, whose new book No Sympathy for the Devil has received quite a bit of blogging attention here. Here, David analyzes Lady Gaga's new single and its place in the history of Christian pop and religious-themed musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar.

Lady Gaga's Judas

by David Stowe

At this time forty years ago Jesus Christ Superstar the double album was near the top of the charts, with the musical slated to open on Broadway in the fall. Godspell was about to open off-Broadway, and Marvin Gaye's spiritually-infused What's Going On was being shipped to record stores.

Now we have Lady Gaga, whose just released single, "Judas," already has some eight million hits. It includes lines likes these

When he comes to me, I am ready
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, bring him down, down
A king with no crown, king with no crown

[Chorus]
I'm just a Holy fool, oh baby he's so cruel
But I'm still in love with Judas, baby
I'm just a Holy fool, oh baby he's so cruel

But I'm still in love with Judas, baby

And also:

In the most Biblical sense,
I am beyond repentance
Fame hooker, prostitute wench, vomits her mind
But in the cultural sense
I just speak in future tense
Judas kiss me if offensed,
Or wear ear condom next time

New York magazine has published a detailed Biblical exegesis of the lyrics:

Lady Gaga's "Judas" is more than a pop anthem to loving the wrong guy: It's also the perfect excuse to examine infamous Catholic schoolgirl Lady Gaga's religiosity and the way she appropriates, inverts, and reworks Biblical allusions and images. Here's a serious, line-by-line analysis of the liturgical references in Judas from Luke 7:38 to John 13:27." They don't call her "Godga" for nothing ...

“I’ll wash his feet with my hair if he needs”
A reference to Luke 7:38, in which Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair. In John 11:2 (and 12:3), she anoints Jesus’ feet with perfume and then wipes them with her hair. In some Christian traditions, Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene are the same person; in other traditions, they are distinct persons. Either way, though, Gaga's take is slightly off: Hair is for wiping or drying feet, not for washing....

Tim Rice meets Madonna. As Mary Magdalene sung so controversially 40 years ago:

I don't know how to love him

What to do, how to move him....

He's a man

He's just a man

And I've had so many

Men before

In very many ways

He's just one more.

Coming Out in the Jesus Movement

Paul Harvey

Recently we've blogged about David Stowe's new book No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Rock Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism, a history of the rise of Christian rock and pop that will interest many of you. David has a a new piece up (well, a couple of weeks old, sorry it took me a while to get to it) that tells us more about his subjects. On the UNC Press blog he has posted "Coming Out of the Jesus Movement: A Conversation with Marsha Stevens-Pino," about one particularly controversial musician he covers in the book. A brief taste:

Larry Norman, whom I wrote about last month, could aptly be called the Bad Boy of Christian Rock, Marsha Stevens might be deemed the Problem Child—even “evangelical Christianity’s worst nightmare.” Yet it would be hard to find a figure who better reflects the continuities and contradictions of the Jesus Movement. Stevens cut her born-again teeth at age sixteen on the beaches of Orange County just when Calvary Chapel was attracting hordes of young people (and more than a few reporters). Like thousands of teenagers from across Southern California she was baptized in the Pacific at Corona del Mar.

Marsha, her sister Wendy, and their significant others formed Children of the Day, a classic Jesus music group that played gentle, folksy songs of faith. One of her songs, “For Those Tears I Died,” became a movement classic. Children of the Day created perhaps the first albums of what’s come to be called praise music, those easy-to-sing, sometimes-maligned anthems that have crowded traditional hymns out of a majority of American evangelical churches, mega- or otherwise.

Over the course of the Seventies, Marsha went from an icon of the Jesus Movement to a pariah. The constant demands of touring and recording took a toll on the Stevens’s marriage. Then she announced she was in love – with a woman. Divorce carried enough stigma in evangelical circles, but leaving one’s husband to take up with another woman—a different order of scandal altogether.

Continue reading here < < < <

Friday Jesus on the Mainline Blogging

Paul Harvey

Thanks to blog reader Chip Callahan, a little musical joy for your Friday, via Ry Cooder and David Lindley, some live "Jesus on the Mainline," from the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1994. Maybe it will restore a bit of your spirit as it has mine. When I call Jesus up to tell him what I want, I think it would be to have the House Republicans not shut down the government just because they want to deny health care to women. Is that too much to ask? (And, don't miss Heather Cox Richardson's narrative of a similar governmental shutdown debacle in 1879, again due to pet project riders, an unwelcome bipartisan tradition in Congress).

Jonathan Walton Speaking at ENC

Randall Stephens

Jonathan Walton (Assistant Professor of African American Religions, Harvard Divinity School) will give a public lecture on "The Preachers' Blues: Reclaiming Authority on Wax," Wednesday, April 13, 4:00pm, Shrader Lecture Hall, Eastern Nazarene College, Quincy, MA.

Walton, a social ethicist and African American religious studies scholar, is the author of Watch This! The Ethics and Aesthetics of African American Religious Broadcasting (New York University Press, 2009) a groundbreaking study on religion, media, and theology. Cornel West (Princeton University) describes the book as "the best work we have on the complex dynamics of the Black megachurch phenomenon. Walton is a brilliant cultural critic and courageous prophetic voice!" James Cone (Union Theological Seminary) lauds Watch This! as "An important examination of the Black Electronic Church. Jonathan Walton brings new insights into the major TV evangelists in the African American community."

Professor Walton will speak at ENC on the history of the religious "race" record industry and the the cultural ethos and competing ethical values of black Christian communities during the 1920s and 1930s. Like all forms of mass culture, says Walton,

religious records served multiple purposes and were interpreted by listeners at varying registers. For many, religious recordings were spiritually edifying and liberating, just as they were wildly entertaining. Critics have show that these religious recordings contested the aesthetic values of the black middle class even as they reinforced bourgeois behavioral codes. By turning our attention to the shared interests of male preachers and the recording industry, I describe how sermons stressing personal piety and culturally familiar stereotypes shaped cultural debates concerning the style, content, and purpose of evangelical preaching in the 20th century.

Musical Monday: Larry Norman and Repurposing the Gospel Aura

Paul Harvey

A couple of musical posts to liven up your Monday. First, blog friend David Stowe, author of the very-soon-to-forthcome No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (which we blogged about a few weeks ago), has a guest post at the UNC Press blog based on a conversation in 2007 with Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman, shortly before he (Norman, that is) passed. The stories, full of musical celebrities, are fun. And he continues:

Were all these stories credible? Who knows. He told me he’d chatted in an airport lounge with a woman in a beautiful jacket who claimed that her husband was Bob Dylan. Andraé Crouch, who happened to be there with Norman, confirmed the woman’s story. Norman confirmed something that my ears had told me: that Dylan’s Grammy-winning single “Gotta Serve Somebody” was closely modeled on Norman’s song “Righteous Rocker,” released several years earlier.

This is a fun read, highly recommended.

As is Douglas Harrison, Repurposing the Gospel Aura, in today's Religion Dispatches, which takes the use of a gospel choir as a backdrop to Eminem's much-commented-upon Chrysler/Detroit commercial as a way of reflecting on how and why this music invites audiences "to imagine themselves as part of a colorblind fellowship of humanity bound together by the soulful sound of a black gospel choir." Harrison reflects on what is gained, and what is lost/missing, in that process. Black gospel is a "universal language of inspiration and transcendence that cuts across race, class, and history," but in the process, "the very real racial tension surrounding the struggle for equality of opportunity in America isn’t so much resolved or reconciled or even recognized. It is simply ignored in these digestible little pageants of musical and psychosocial harmony."

Thinking of this post at Religion Dispatches, it's a good time to congratulate our blog contributor Gerardo Marti, who has just finished his book manuscript, for Oxford, on a very similar theme: Worship Across the Racial Divide: Notions of Race and Religious Practice in Multiracial Churches, coming out with Oxford next year. Gerardo talks about how African American music comes to stand for authenticity in the churches he studies. And he talks about much else besides -- maybe we can entice him to do a little post here in celebration of mailing off the manuscript, telling us about his work a bit more? Let's hear it, ya'll.

More on Arcade Fire and the Suburban Soul (and Self-Promotion)

Paul Harvey

Monday I posted briefly about the Grammys, including surprise winner for Best Album, Arcade Fire. In (as Luke Harlow would say) the best self-promotional RiAH tradition, I draw your attention to Religion Dispatches today, where I develop those thoughts on Arcade Fire at greater length, with a piece about their current record The Suburbs and previous efforts Funeral and Neon Bible. A little excerpt below, and then you can follow the link from there:

Has there been a major pop group more concerned with exploring personal anxieties, aspirations, and narratives through music defined so fundamentally by religious themes? The turmoil and paranoia of the last decade—wars, attacks, economic crashes, myriad color-coded fears—run through Arcade Fire’s three full-length records: Funeral, Neon Bible, and The Suburbs. The newest effort induces a tour of previous decades, when suburbia seemed (but only seemed) to offer placidity and refuge from the wilderness downtown.

Continue reading . . .

Esperanza Spalding, Arcade Fire, and Why There is a God

Paul Harvey

I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Theodore Parker.

He must have been watching the Grammys last night.

Every time I fall into despair about that "bends towards justice" line, something happens to keep hope alive, and put God back on my mental map again. The last couple of weeks have been such a time -- Egypt, the Packers, Glenn Beck's ratings falling off a cliff -- and ending with an actual victory for musical truth and justice last night at the Grammys: the recognition of Esperanza Spalding for "Best New Artist" (keeping in mind that she's already 26 and has a whole stack of recordings already, she's only "new" since popular music only wakes up and recognizes jazz once every 10-20 years), and Arcade Fire for best record for The Suburbs. Spalding gave a nice lesson in grace (listen and learn, Kanye) in complimenting her competition, notably Justin Bieber, whose angry fans were tweeting in furiously and defacing Spalding's Wikipedia page from their teenage wastelands. Oh well, they'll grow up.

Aside from her own records, I wanted to draw your attention to one new collaboration of Spalding's, with the great veteran saxophonist Joe Lovano: Bird Songs, just out from Blue Note Records, featuring Lovano, Spalding on bass, and an all-star lineup reinterpreting Charlie Parker's tunes. Not surprisingly (to me), Lovano finds a spiritual core to classics such as "Yardbird Suite":

"Yardbird Suite" appears on the album in two distinct versions. First as "Birdyard," a piece that Lovano put together to feature the aulochrome. "I took a phrase from 'Yardbird Suite' and turned it into a kind of whirling dervish of sorts through five different keys and improvised on the aulochrome over that. It would have been incredible to hear Charlie Parker play that instrument and develop ideas within the possibilities of this horn."

The version of "Yardbird Suite" that closes the album is the perfect summation of the spirit of adventure with which Lovano approached this project. "It came to me one day, I heard that melody as a hymn, as a spiritual, and I started to play it just by myself unaccompanied saxophone. And then I heard all these parts, added an interlude, and went into a 6/8 kind of a dance, and it turned out to be a really different exploration on that piece of music."

As for Arcade Fire, has there been a major pop group more concerned with exploring religious themes through their music? Most obviously, at times perhaps laying it on a little too thickly, this came in their last CD Neon Bible, but The Suburbs is full, too, of anxious contemplation of uncovering meaning in dispiriting environments. A thoughtful review, which compares the CD to Springsteen's The River (and also likes it more than the heavier-handed Neon Bible, a conclusion with which I beg to differ as I believe the former is a bit more ambitious and interesting musically), is here. An older interview with Arcade Fire's leader Win Butler, including a discussion of some of his formative religious influences, is here.

Esperanza shows us hope, even in the suburbs.

Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold Johnny Cash's Body Down

Paul Harvey

"Want to be part of a new Johnny Cash video?" You can.

I had forgotten that Cash's last recording, in his American Recordings series right before his death, was the southern spiritual classic "Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down" (sometimes done as "Can Hold My Body Down", or with other variations of same), recorded countless times by just about everybody except the Rolling Stones it seems (Keith Richards not wanting to tempt fate, perhaps). Way back in the last century (summer 1998), I once heard a cover of it, completely unexpectedly, performed by the Tarbox Ramblers at The Burren in Somerville, Massachusetts, one of those magical live musical moments one never forgets. A shout out to the Tufts students smart enough to dance in a frenzy to the Ramblers' uptempo version of the tune.

Today's Morning edition features Chris Milk's Johnny Cash Project, which I was previously unfamiliar with. Milk is virtually stitching together pieces of digital art together with Cash's recording as a posthumous tribute to the man in black (click on the link to the Johnny Cash project to submit your own entry). Just for fun, here's a Youtube tribute along the same lines, the recording together with photograph highlights of Cash's career. A review of the entire last album is here. Johnny lives.

No Sympathy for the Devil

Paul Harvey

Those of you who know Randall know that one of his hobbies is collecting quotations from evangelicals hysterically opposing the newfound demon of rock-n-roll music in the 1950s and 1960s (maybe Randall will post a few of those here for us), part of his research on the reaction of evangelical to rock in its early days. Going a bit further: I once saw Julian Bond give a great talk about civil rights and popular culture, starting with one of those overwrought quotations, which sounded like a typical screed against rock coming from some straightlaced white evangelical ca. 1957 -- but as it turned out came from Martin Luther King, who could preach the anti-rock message with the best of them.

Obviously a lot has changed in the relationship of evangelicals to popular musical culture since then. And I expect to see that explained thoroughly in this forthcoming text, that I think a lot of you are going to be interested in this one when it comes out (pub. date is listed as April 2011): David Stowe, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism.

Stowe, who teaches English and religious studies at Michigan State, previously authored a book about big band jazz in the New Deal Era (Swing Changes), and more recently (and relevantly for this blog) the really fine study How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard Press, 2004), an exploration covering topics from hymns to hip-hop, and from Jewish cantors to Native American chanters.

I look forward to digging into this one soon; information from the book's website is pasted in below.

In this cultural history of evangelical Christianity and popular music, David Stowe demonstrates how mainstream rock of the 1960s and 1970s has influenced conservative evangelical Christianity through the development of Christian pop music. For an earlier generation, the idea of combining conservative Christianity with rock--and its connotations of nonreligious, if not antireligious, attitudes--may have seemed impossible. Today, however, Christian rock and pop comprises the music of worship for millions of Christians in the United States, with recordings outselling classical, jazz, and New Age music combined.

Shining a light on many of the artists and businesspeople key to the development of Christian rock, Stowe shows how evangelicals adapted rock and pop in ways that have significantly affected their religion's identity and practices. The chart-topping, spiritually inflected music created a space in popular culture for talk of Jesus, God, and Christianity, thus lessening for baby boomers and their children the stigma associated with religion while helping to fill churches and create new modes of worship. Stowe argues that, in the four decades since the Rolling Stones first unleashed their hit song, "Sympathy for the Devil," the increasing acceptance of Christian pop music by evangelicals ultimately has reinforced a variety of conservative cultural, economic, theological, and political messages.