A review of Leah Payne’s “God gave Rock & Roll to you”
For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with the sound of my voice. Now before you write me off as a narcissist, let me explain. Growing up in rural Arkansas as the last of four children, there weren’t a lot of opportunities for me to be heard. Overlooked and underappreciated, and often just downright ignored, I found that speaking to myself often provided proof of my existence. When my fourth-grade teacher complimented my voice after reading a piece of poetry aloud, that was all the encouragement that I needed to pursue other opportunities to speak.
One year for my birthday, I was gifted a cassette tape recorder and a package of blank tapes, that I immediately fashioned into my very own personal radio station. Recording the sounds around me and anyone patient enough to sit for an interview, I was well on my way to crafting multiple episodes of my own show. As I got older, I figured out a way to make my shows more interesting by exploring a subject of fundamental importance in my world. The homespun theology and philosophies of our small, rural, Pentecostal church became a frequent topic, and my brother-in-law (a recent convert) was a frequent guest. And of course, the soundtrack was Contemporary Christian Music. These rock’n’roll and later rap music tracks loaded with lyrics amplifying the themes of the American evangelical subculture of 1980s and 90s, served as my vehicle for local notoriety.
At sixteen, I landed a job as the first ever Christian music DJ at our local skating rink. My job was to entertain the youth groups that attended the exclusive Tuesday night Christian music skate, along with the occasional private parties, with the latest sounds of upbeat positive Christian music stylings of artists like Petra, DeGarmo and Key, Amy Grant, and Michael W. Smith, and later DC talk. Of course, the couple skate was always accompanied by a slow ballad that featured a love song to Jesus, where your current boo could easily be substituted for our Lord and Savior. My friends thought I was strange for being obsessed with music that promoted, among other popular evangelical themes, sexual abstinence. They couldn’t understand why anyone would be into that. On the other hand, my parents, along with other adults from my church, including the pastor, disliked the rock and rap rhythms because they believed such music would encourage sexual indulgence.
I endured more than one sermon where I was singled out for my commitment to this “worldly” music. On one occasion, my pastor’s wife even confiscated my DC Talk albums declaring them off limits for our youth group’s skate night. There were actual church board meetings where me and my music were an agenda item, nestled right between discussions of the color of the new carpet in the auditorium and whether raffling a shotgun to raise money for foreign missions was gambling. I was a rebel for all the wrong reasons, and I was having the time of my life.
So, when I heard that religious scholar Dr. Leah Payne was releasing a book detailing the history of Contemporary Christian Music, I was eager to read it. I was not disappointed. Leah Payne’s book “God Gave Rock & Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music” contains a wealth of information about the origins, perpetuation, decline, and reinvention of this often-ridiculed musical form. Payne skillfully articulates that CCM, like so much of American iterations of evangelical Christianity, has served the meta narratives of capitalistic and white dominated cultures more than it served the gospel of Jesus. Payne writes, “The story of CCM is the story of how white evangelicals looked to the marketplace for signs of God’s work in the world. While there were always notable dissenters, for the most part those within the industry regarded profits as a sign of God’s blessing.”
As much as I like to look back on my youth and my involvement with CCM as a nostalgic convergence of romantic notions of pure religion and artistic expression, it turns out that it was far more strategic than providential. As Payne observes, “To rescue the youth of the nation, evangelicals faced the prospect of a deal with a musical devil.” The “devil” to which Payne refers isn’t the “voodoo drumbeats” that my pastor railed against with racist overtones, but in actuality was a large network of political and evangelical subcultures that conspired to keep the future of the United States right, which in the eyes of many evangelicals meant keeping it “white.”
The color divide between the stylings of religious music produced by Black singers and musicians was differentiated as “gospel” whereas religious music produced by white singers and musicians most often received the designation of “Christian music.” With this “Christian music” often being appropriations of Black gospel music that was homogenized for white audiences. Specifically, the target of CCM wasn’t me or my young friends, but rather it was our “white evangelical parents.” Marketing agents even created the architype CCM customer, a “Becky” who was, according to Payne, “a data driven composite sketch of the typical buyer of CCM -a suburban, middle-to-upper-class straight white woman who raised her kids with the help of Contemporary Christian Music.”
Thankfully, as Payne points out, there were a handful of dissenters who objected to reducing Christian artistry to a commodity to be bought and sold to perpetuate the aims of capitalism. Dissenters like singer-songwriter Rich Mullins who “was critical of CCM’s prosperity and its ‘little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful house where you have no gays and minority groups anywhere near you.’”
The soundtracks of my CCM youth have been replaced, of late, with ubiquitous “praise and worship” music that now dominates the background music of evangelicalism. With much of it being mass produced to be sung in churches across the country. The result of “only a handful of megachurches including Bethel, Hillsong, Elevation, and Passion…The worship-music industry was an undeniably profitable business…” writes Payne.
Dr. Leah Payne’s work in “God gave Rock & Roll to You” is a cautionary tale illustrating that even those of us with the best of intentions to worship God in every aspect of artistic expression are susceptible to the omnipotent concerns of capitalism. Jesus did warn us that it was impossible to serve God and money, it seems that we, in so many instances, have made the wrong choice.
Dr. Payne’s book is a worthy read that will inform and challenge all that you thought you knew about an odd genre and expression of modern American Christianity. I encourage you to read it, and then celebrate with a dance to an Amy Grant tune, as CCM still lives on Spotify.
Scot Loyd 