ARTICLE TOOLS

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Remember Stryper? The hard rock band that referenced Isaiah 53:5 has been out of style since Pearl Jam and other Seattle grunge bands radically altered the music scene in the early '90s. But while Stryper is no longer hip, their take on Christian musicians still is.

In 1985 CT covered that odd Christian group who sold their music to secular audiences through a secular record label and were heard on secular radio. "If you're out there in the secular world and you don't have Christ, you're not going to see a group because they talk about Christ," said Michael Sweet, the band's then 24-year-old lead singer and guitarist. "You're going to go hear a band because they're good, and because they have a good stage show. Stryper is trying to stay away from being known as a Christian band. We want to be known as a metal band for Christ."

In a recent CT article, I lamented how Stryper's attitude seems to have changed among contemporary Christian musicians. They're still trying to stay away from being known as Christian bands, but they're not trying to be known as rock bands for Christ. Instead of breaking into the mainstream music scene through the power of good music, many bands are entering the Christian industry and then asking their record labels to help them cross over into the mainstream scene.

I find the attitude a bit duplicitous. The bands play up their Christian identity, build a fan base, and then, knowing their Christian fans will still buy albums, they play down their faith in order to sound palatable to mainstream audiences. It's a contradiction Andrew Beaujon explores in his book Body Piercing Saved My Life: Inside the Phenomenon of Christian Rock.

The sometimes confused Christian rock industry has been that way since the beginning. Back in the '70s, when Christian rock was taking off thanks to musically-inclined Jesus freaks, the founders of Christian rock were seen as rebels. "It's been the quandary for musicians ever since Larry Norman," says John J. Thompson, owner of a Christian music store and alternative record label. "They're too holy for the world and too worldly for the church." Thompson talked to CT about a new crop of Christian alternative musicians who were trying to break into the industry in the mid-'90s.

Other bands like Kings X have also tried to make a go in the mainstream music world and done fairly well. Though you may not have heard of them, if you need proof of their ability, "just ask the bands that have asked the Houston trio to open for them—Pearl Jam, AC/DC, Aerosmith, Metallica, the Scorpions, and others," writes Mark Joseph in Re:generation Quarterly.

When it comes to rock music, the line is thin dividing the sacred and the profane. Some fans describe a spiritual experience listening to rock. "The effect of the music coursing through my nervous system is to produce a lift, a somatic levity that sends me at once deeply within and outside my body, spacing me in three simultaneous modes: as embodied spirit, as disembodied spirit, and as a spirit ecstatically holding them bound," writes Tom Beaudoin about listening to Creed in a monastery.

The spiritual ecstasy created by rock music does not come by accident. Beaudoin writes for Books & Culture that the book Flowers in the Dustbin "suggests that rock's rise and decline is directly tied to the development of, and eventual abuse of, its religious power."

Seeing Elvis Presley, Beaudoin writes, was like watching a "Pentecostal enthusiast bursting with the spirit … trembling in ecstasy and speaking in tongues." Unfortunately for rock fans, that spiritual promise was abused. "What killed rock," Bequdoin says, "was idolatry, the sin that haunts every experience of rapturous (or even mundane) self-transcendence."

Of course Elvis wasn't the only musician to turn spiritual rapture to self-indulgence. In fact, he wasn't the last church-going musician to do so. Because the line between worship and hedonism can be thin, believers don't need labels to tell them what music is or isn't "Christian." You'll know when as you listen, singing along in your car, you stop and wonder, Was I singing out loud just now, or was I praying?