Christian Rock

The CCM counterculture has its own stars, artists mostly unknown to the mainstream pop music cognoscenti?Jars of Clay, Steven Curtis Chapman, Third Day, Avalon, Switchfoot, DC Talk, Jaci Velasquez, Plus One, Audio Adrenaline, Newsboys and Jennifer Knapp. CCM sales reached $538 million in 1996; in 1999 the Christian music industry sold nearly 50 million albums?an increase of 11.5 percent over the previous year.

Individual Christian artists have had success in the mainstream market: Velasquez has achieved pop success in the Latin market, Bob Carlisle's "Butterfly Kisses" was a country hit, Jars of Clay's "Flood" video has gotten MTV play and Sixpence None the Richer notably scored a number-one hit with "Kiss Me" in 1999. Still, the CCM counterculture remains a sort of alternative universe?most rock and pop fans don't even know it exists. Which is a shame.

CCM is not old-time gospel set to rock, but music in a contemporary style with a Christian message. In fact, the Christian message in CCM is sometimes so subtle as to be nearly invisible. For instance, Switchfoot's "Poparazzi'' is a jumpy commentary on popular culture ("Leave me alone with your social mingle/You try so hard to stay on top/Leave me alone with your little jingle/With your picture perfect pop"). The lyrics include mentions of Nirvana, MTV and MP3, but except for one fleeting reference to "the graven image of Marilyn Monroe" (the idolatry of worshipping Hollywood's gods and goddesses) the song has no religious content at all.

Even when the religious message of CCM is more explicit, it is still usually a long way from the washed-in-the-blood evangelism of the Baptist Hymnal. Consider the chorus of Aaron Benward's "Captured": "I see heaven/You have opened my eyes/I feel forever/'Cause your heart is close to mine/The moment you set me free/Was the moment you captured me."

Except for the reference to heaven?and "heaven" is not exactly an uncommon lyric in pop music?this could be any Top 40 love song. The religious content of a CCM tune like this is subjective, dependent upon the listener's familiarity with Christian culture.

The young fundamentalist listening to the song hears "heaven" and "forever" and more or less gestalts the promise of eternal life. The Christian listener hears "your heart is close to mine" and understands the divine antecedent of the second person pronoun. The evident contradiction of "set me free" and "captured me" is understood by the Christian as liberation from sin, on the one hand, and loyal service to Christ on the other?because the atoning blood of Jesus "sets me free" from sin and death; he has "captured me" in that I owe him my life in gratitude for his sacrifice.

At times, CCM's apparent imperative toward ambiguity results in brilliant poetry, as in Jill Phillips' "Steel Bars": "I refuse to be/Locked up here like a prisoner/Where all I ever get/Is a meal and four walls/Used to be/I was happy here/But not anymore/Gonna break through/These steel bars." Sinful, worldly existence is artfully rendered as a prison, and the powerful rock arrangement heightens the intensity of the metaphor, the drums pounding and the chord progression building to the dominant before resolving to the tonic as the prisoner escapes. The listener can only find this religious message, however, if he knows what he is listening for?his Christian understanding informs the lyrics with an implicit meaning. It's almost postmodern.

This is even more true of Velasquez's "Every Time I Fall." The naive listener who didn't know that she is the hottest act in Christian music might hear the beat-happy O-Town sound and think he was listening to the latest Britney clone, singing a love song for the TRL audience:

Every time I fall a little bit harder.

Every time I fall a little bit farther.

Every time I fall,

I fall right back into your arms.

Deliberate ambiguity? The secular listener would think this is a song about falling in love, but as the verses ("Every tune I try/To explain the reason why/I have let you down/I fall to the ground") make more clear, at least to the believer, it's about stumbling into sin and being forgiven by God.

A carefully polished production like "Every Time I Fall" fairly screams crossover potential. The hook-laden tune, the synth-pop sound, the rangy, powerful voice?welcome to MTV. But CCM artists and audiences are leery of crossing into the pop market, for a variety of reasons. CCM acts are likely to speak of their careers in terms of "ministry" and "witness." If their songs are not always explicitly Christian, their lives must be. The CCM performer is expected to live the life of the redeemed: no booze, no drugs, no fornication. There is a logic here. If the CCM artists are proclaiming victory over sin through the power of Jesus, it would be hypocritical for them to be boozing it up and sleeping around.

And crossing over into the pop music market suggests at least the danger of slipping into a typical showbiz lifestyle. There was a certain I-told-you-so backlash when one of the first CCM superstars, Amy Grant, followed her crossover into the country mainstream by dumping her three kids and husband of 16 years and taking up with country singer Vince Gill. Grant remains a controversial figure in the CCM world; some fans have forgiven her, while others see her as an unrepentant adulteress.

Expectations of exemplary lives are not the only pressures that inhibit the crossover potential of CCM artists. If a CCM act like Sixpence None the Richer reaches a pop audience, their Christian fans expect them to use that mass-market success as an opportunity to witness and testify for the faith. But a pop audience doesn't want to hear preaching, so CCM artists who cross over face temptation to mute their messages as the price for mainstream acceptance.

The CCM counterculture thus presents certain questions. If the religious message is so ambiguous, how effective can CCM be as a means of proselytization? If the Christian content of CCM is only apparent to the faithful, aren't these artists just preaching to the converted? And if the exacting expectations of their Christian fans prevent CCM artists from crossing over into the musical mainstream, how can they ever expect to take their message to a wider audience?

Such questions, however, need not hinder the listener's enjoyment of CCM, the best of which is very good music by any standard. The shimmering pop of Avalon, the crunchy guitar-rock of Switchfoot, the urban sensibilities of DC Talk, the boy-band sounds of Plus One?whatever your preferred musical genre, there is a CCM act working in it, and working well. It is an unfortunate fact of our secularized society that such excellent music is largely consigned to a gospel ghetto by the prejudice of pop programmers. On the bright side, though, it beats being fed to the lions.

Robert Stacy McCain is an assistant national editor for The Washington Times.