Who killed Christian rock music?

Ask a church receptionist #11

Welcome to another installment of Ask a church receptionist, a monthly column where I answer your questions about the Bible, Christianity, and why your mom never hugged you.

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Dear church receptionist,

I appreciated your piece on “Mary, Did You Know?” and I was wondering if you could write a bit more on “contemporary Christian music” (CCM). It felt like really exciting things were happening in the genre around the turn of the millennium; now it seems like it barely exists. Do you have any insight into what happened there?

Thanks,

McKenna

Dear M. C. Kenna🎤,

…really? This is the kind of thing you guys want me to write about? I’m overflowing with fun facts about the Second Council of Nicaea and the Book of Tobit, but you all just want to hear about Amy Grant and Stryper?

I mean…

All right, fine.

[sits backward in chair; turns baseball cap around; puts on best ‘youth pastor’ face]

Lemme tell you kids about some super-rad tunes that glorify our super-rad savior instead of super un-rad things like drugs and sex!!!

[After the break:]

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To start with, McKenna, I actually agree with you that there was a lot of exciting stuff happening in CCM (my favorite music genre named after a hockey gear brand) around the turn of the millennium—though it’s entirely possible that’s because I turned 14 around that time, and psychological research has found that pretty much everyone thinks whatever they were listening to when they turned 14 is the greatest music of all time.¹ The genre has the reputation of being little more than bland adult contemporary with “Jesus” subbed in for “baby”—and that reputation isn’t entirely unearned (looking at you, Amy Grant)—but in the mid-1990s, it really did blossom into a healthy scene of all sorts of artists experimenting with countless genres and striving to write interesting and inventive music. I remember being just as wowed by bands like Chasing Furies and Mortal as I ever was by Nine Inch Nails or Ben Folds.

Now, though? It seems like it’s hard to come across good Christian pop, rock, rap, etc.—even when you’re specifically looking for it. So what happened? I think the same thing that happened to all music in the 1990s: money—first a lot of it, and then none of it.

We don’t really even have to talk about the “Christian” angle here—there was a lot of exciting stuff happening in music in general in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and there was really one reason for it: the rise of the CD. Just as the LP’s advent in the 1960s had given way to towering artistic achievements by everyone from the Beatles to Miles Davis, the CD set the stage for ambitious efforts by everyone from Nirvana to the Notorious B.I.G. LPs and CDs gave artists huge canvases to experiment on, but more importantly, fans were willing to spend a ton of money on them, making record execs a lot more likely to throw cash at weird experiments. Most of these failed (both artistically and commercially), but the handful that succeeded tended to be so profitable that it didn’t matter—and so memorable that people still recall these eras as golden ages.

Then people realized they could steal music, and everything fell apart.

In the late 1970s, this meant the rise of cassette tapes and home-dubbing; in the late 1990s, this was brought about by the far-more-apocalyptic rise of online file-sharing (Napster et. al.). All of a sudden, instead of paying (in 2025 dollars) around fifty bucks² for each new album, people could get as much music as they wanted for free. And even if you think this sort of music-sharing was morally defensible, it should be obvious that it made for record companies that were suddenly far less flush with cash to throw at weird, innovative stuff—so they retreated to economic sure-things instead.

Suddenly, the rise of Nickelback makes a lot more sense, doesn’t it? I think we can all probably agree that those guys were, at best, a third-rate Creed knockoff—who were themselves a third-rate Pearl Jam knockoff—but there’s no question why Nickelback, and not Pearl Jam, were ruling the airwaves by the mid-2000s. While Pearl Jam were busy being precious about their artistic integrity and (understandably!) picking fights with TicketMaster, Nickelback was reliably churning out records and shows that—while far from critically beloved or history-making—reliably connected with the sort of listeners who were just-unsavvy-enough to not know how Napster worked (and therefore still bought a lot of CDs).

Something similar-but-different happened in the Christian music world. The Christian labels, like all other labels, retreated to the most reliably profitable music—but for them, instead of generic butt-rock, that turned out to be generic “praise and worship” music—that is, the music that was ready-made for singing in megachurches. After all, there was no way to know what the next big Christian genre fad would be (Christian EDM? Christian doom metal? Christian zydeco?), but “cool” churches consistently needed songs to sing and were consistently willing to pay the performance royalties for the latest tunes—so the industry focused on that, and everything else atrophied.³

I remember, a decade or so ago, seeing a friend of mine share a link online of a webpage about “Where are your favorite Christian rock stars…now???” The answer for most was “working in a gas station” or something similar. She added the commentary, “Wow, Christian record labels must be run terribly.” While there’s truth to that, it’s probably true of most record labels (especially indie labels, which is what most Christian labels were in the early 1990s): the earth is littered with people who were once in bands and recorded a couple albums (possibly even beloved ones!), but never managed to make a career out of it. The whole music industry is designed to funnel money away from artists and toward execs; the median recording artist probably makes less than zero dollars playing the game. Most people don’t realize this because the only artists on their radar are the top one percent of the top one percent in terms of success and business savvy.

But yeah. The golden age of Christian rock and pop may be behind us, but so is the golden age of disco, and prog rock, and bebop, and countless other genres. The good news is there’s still a ton of great music out there—both Christian-themed and otherwise—for anyone willing to look for it.

Still dreaming of one day being a big rock star (living in hilltop houses, driving fifteen cars),

—the church receptionist 🕹🌙🧸

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Got a question about the Bible, Christianity, or anything else for a real, honest-to-God church receptionist who literally wrote the book on the Bible? Send it to luke.t.harrington@gmail.com, or just click the button below:

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⬅️ In case you missed it: From the wreckage

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1. I swear like 80% of my brain is still taken up by that Sheryl Crow cover of “Sweet Child o’ Mine”

2. This is a very rough figure, but here’s how I arrived at it: A quick internet search tells me an LP cost about $4 in 1965, which inflation calculators tell me is about $40 now; a CD sold for about $20 in 1985, which (per the same inflation calculators) is about $60 in today’s money. Then I averaged the two, because that’s a totally legit thing to do with completely unrelated figures, right?

3. Around this time, I remember seeing an article in a Christian magazine about how “praise and worship music” was the “hot new trend”—which made me cringe for many obvious reasons