Bonus Ep. 4: God, Rock and Roll, and Bloody Noses w/ Leah Payne
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Our monthly bonus episode begins with a visit from Dr. Leah Payne, author of God Gave you Rock and Roll: A History of Contemporary Christian Music. Brad and Dan ask her about the cultural significance of God rock and the ways that it reflects White evangelicalism's ideal family, gender roles, and sexual ethic. They all also tell hilarious stories of their own youthful experiences with Christian music - including the time Dan broke a dude's nose in a mosh pit and then prayed it out with him as a good brother in Christ.
In the second hour, they turn to the Trump immunity trial and the ways it is threatening to tank the Jack Smith case and erode our democracy from within. Dan then does a deep dive into a report about trans care coming out of the UK - something that will make its way across the pond soon to the ears of every Uncle Ron in the country.
The episode finishes with responses to a few very thoughtful AMAs.
Buy Leah's book: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/god-gave-rock-and-roll-to-you-9780197555248?cc=us⟨=en&
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My name's Brad Onishi, faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our bonus episode, the exciting time of the month where we sit down, we answer questions, we tell stories, we let it loose a little bit.
Dan, I think he's drinking a beer.
Are you there, Dan, drinking a beer?
I am.
I am here, and I cannot confirm or deny that I'm drinking a beer.
All right.
All right.
I'm not going to ask you what beer, because then we're going to get emails about people hate that beer, or they love it, or then it's going to be a whole hipster debate in the Discord.
I don't want to do it.
I am drinking a nice coffee because I went on a boba overload last week.
Some people got hurt, and I don't want to really go down that road again.
I'm trying to be better.
We joke about me living on the edge.
I'm just saying, like, you know, got to cut back on the boba, go back to the coffee.
But enough of this chicanery.
We have a very special guest today, and that is Dr. Leah Payne of Portland Seminary, author of God Gave You Rock and Roll, an amazing book we're going to talk about right now.
Leah, thanks for coming here.
Thanks for being here.
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
I am so honored to be here.
Thank you.
So one of the things about this show is like Dan and I have always said, you know, we are scholars who study this stuff just like you.
You are the host of Weird Religion.
You've written extensively all over the place about Pentecostals and charismatics.
You had, you just had an amazing Podcast series run by Wave PRX that was on Christian Contemporary Music and The Rock That Doesn't Roll, I believe is the title, and I got to be part of one of those episodes.
So you've just done everything.
You've written all over the place for NBC, for WaPo, for so many other outlets.
One of the things we like to say on this show is just like you, we've lived it and now we study it.
So I think we all three of us have a kind of bifocal lens.
So we're excited to talk about your book as scholars.
And then we're going to tell hilarious stories about Dan and I being hella cringy as young I say hella.
I live in the Bay Area, okay?
Get over it, Dan.
Dan's like laughing.
Dan's laughing in a way that I don't appreciate right now.
And this might be the end of the podcast if you keep it up, Dan.
I'm not sure I'm going to want to do this anymore.
I'm going to edit it out.
That's fine.
I'll just edit it out.
I love it.
You guys want to make fun of me, I'll edit it out.
That's fine.
I haven't said anything.
Okay?
I haven't said anything.
Look, that's ... All right.
We were very cringy.
Dan's going to talk about breaking someone's nose at a mosh pit.
We're going to have some tattoo reveals maybe.
Oh, yeah.
And Leah's going to be the expert who's going to totally help us understand all this.
Let's start here.
Your book is amazing.
In some ways it feels a little like a scholarly journey that started with a personal history.
You're a PNW person through and through, but you moved to Nashville as a young person and you were like in the epicenter of contemporary Christian music.
So tell us about that and how that like very formative experience led to this book.
Sure.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yes, and PNW, you know the West Coast.
I love, you know, so many scholars are based in the East Coast.
So I do love, you know, my parents actually lived in the Bay Area, Brad.
I don't think, I don't know if that's ever come up in our conversation, but they, my parents were a part of the charismatic revivals known as the Jesus Movement in the 1970s in the Bay Area.
And They had me, raised me in Oregon, and so a lot of my earliest memories—my dad was a pastor, I write about this in the book—a lot of my earliest memories were in very charismatic church services wherein music called Jesus Music, which was music made by these hippie-ized Christians who became a part of charismatic evangelicalism in the late 20th century.
Music produced by those people, so well-known musicians like Larry Norman and Second Chapter of Acts and Keith Green and stuff like that.
So that was just like a part of my childhood and young adulthood.
My dad, though, did not like this thing called contemporary Christian music.
My dad is very offline, so he hasn't heard me talking about his curmudgeonly ways.
But he didn't like CCM.
He thought it wasn't good.
He thought the quality was poor.
He liked Jesus music, though.
So I grew up on a lot of that stuff.
But you know, just growing up in a charismatic church, a predominantly white charismatic church in the in the Pacific Northwest, of course I knew what CCM was, what Contemporary Christian Music was.
And so for those of you who don't know, contemporary Christian music is, I define it as popular music that is made and made by and sold to predominantly white evangelical Christians in the United States.
It had a much bigger footprint than that, but that is kind of the market.
My book, God Gave Rock and Roll to You, is a history of a market, and so it's actually about a business mostly.
Anyway, so then when I graduated from college, I married a musician who was an aspiring contemporary Christian music artist.
So of course you have to move to Nashville, Tennessee, and that was the early aughts.
And at that time, that was the height of the business.
And so the business in terms of its cultural power as well as its financial stature, apparently.
Of course, none of us knew at the time that the internet, or the interweb as my mom used to call it, was going to be changing everything about how music was done as a business.
And so contemporary Christian music is not as prominent as it once was.
My book explores how that came to be.
But I just wanted to, you know, eventually I went on to graduate school and I worked in the music business for a little while and then I went to grad school.
And I became a historian, and I thought that CCM, Contemporary Christian Music, was just, like, in my rearview mirror.
But I kept coming back to it as a very powerful thing, because I think a lot of people view it as kitsch, as a tertiary part of the evangelical experience.
But my understanding of contemporary Christian music was that it was often the core of understanding evangelical identity.
So the question of my book is, what do you learn about evangelicalism if you look at the history of this industry?
And so it does come from my personal experiences knowing a lot of, I mean, pretty much every kid I went to church with had been to a music festival, had been in a mosh pit, had been, you know, it was just a really big part of growing up as evangelical.
And it's oftentimes been talked about as part of the periphery, but I wanted to look at it, give it the leading role.
So anyway, and I understand that you two have experiences with Christian music as well.
So I can't wait to hear about that.
We do.
We're going to try to keep it together here for a couple more minutes and be serious hosts and scholars, yes, before we get into the archives.
I want to ask, you mentioned your dad not loving CCM, and I think there's a current in your book in the sort of 60s, 70s, and 80s of some ministers Being not on board with the Christian contemporary music scene.
And friends, if you're not somebody who grew up in this scene, we're talking about people that range genres.
We're talking about everything from punk rock to what you might just call soft rock, the kind of stuff you'd hear in a dentist's office.
We're talking about- Christian Kenny G, that end of the spectrum.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Kenny JC, Dan.
So, and, uh, I mean, we're talking about, uh, heavy metal.
We'll get into it in a minute.
We're talking about, like, big band, uh, I mean, just solo artists, Amy Grant, the whole thing.
I guess Help us understand your dad in historical context, because the whole time I was reading your book, I was thinking, this book is going to be so many things.
It's going to be such a contribution to 20th century evangelical studies.
It's a contribution to our understanding of our contemporary moment.
It's a contribution to music studies, of course.
But it's also going to be this really, like, it's going to place people in time and space.
Like, Kirsten Kobe's book places a lot of people in time and space in a way that is hard.
Because they're like, oh, I lived this and it sucked.
I think a lot of people are going to read your book and be like, oh, yeah, this was me.
Yep.
I was in that era.
I love those bands that she's talking about.
These are the people that got me through high school.
These are the people I listened to on the bus to summer camp with my friends.
But there's also your dad who's like, nope, this is the devil's music or this is not what Jesus wants.
So what was that tension?
Well, so the book starts, you know, it's sort of hard to know where to start a book like this.
I ended up choosing the beginning of the business.
And so if you look at the major record labels that produced a huge percentage of what we call contemporary Christian music, Most of them had roots in Southern holiness and Baptist and Pentecostal revivals in the early 20th century.
So that the largest, one of the largest record labels, for example, Benson, the people who created the record label Benson, it's a multi-generational family effort that started in the late 19th century in a tent revival meeting in an abandoned lot in Nashville, Tennessee.
And it was a group of people who would go on to become founding members of the Nazarene Church, originally called the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, but they took that first part off once Pentecostal was associated with things like speaking in tongues.
But the communities that created contemporary Christian music were these white revivalist networks.
So an overwhelming majority of people who charted on what we call contemporary Christian music are either from the Holiness tradition, so people like Nazarenes, Westlands, Baptists, mostly Southern Baptists, but other forms of predominantly white Baptists, and then Pentecostal and Charismatic.
And Pentecostals, of course, are a really distinct group in a number of ways, one including the fact that they had an interracial origin story.
In the early 20th century.
And the Pentecostals, and then their sort of sister tradition that comes up about 50 or 60 years later, those people create this form of music.
They're co-creators of a form of music that is rooted in Black culture and also rooted in white holiness and Pentecostal culture known as rock and roll.
And that music It's essentially church music that is reappropriated in the public sphere, and that becomes a real sticking point for a lot of white revivalists.
So they don't know what to do with it.
In the book, and other historians have written about this, so I want to acknowledge their contributions as well.
But in the book, I talk about how white Baptist folks were beside themselves in part because the conversations about rock and roll essentially became a proxy conversation to talk about race and racism in the United States and specifically anti-black racism and civil rights and things like that.
For both black and white Pentecostals, rock was a real sticking point because it was, in their minds, a denigration of holy music.
So it's like church music that's used in an inappropriate way.
Like, you're talking about, you know, great balls of fire.
You should be talking about the Holy Spirit and now you're talking about sex.
What?
You know?
So there's this constant tension in these communities about what to do with this music and how to shape the young through music.
So in the early 20th century, revivalist hymns were used to shape the young in ways like, for example, temperance hymns, hymns that encouraged young people to stay away from alcohol.
In the later 20th century, basically you can chart what conservative white revivalists, and really they kind of come together with an umbrella category of evangelical In the mid-20th century, you can see what people who gather under that umbrella care about by what they sing about, especially about music that's aimed at the young.
So abortion, prayer in public schools, any, you know, any hot topic, they're wrestling with it.
A lot of stuff about sexuality.
So they're, you know, if you, Brad, you were on our podcast, Rock That Doesn't Roll, where we talked about the kind of topics that it's like, you know, there'd be mainstream music that It's about one thing and then contemporary Christian music it's like it's a it's a another conversation you know going on about how to be young and so there's constantly like people you know people in my dad's generation my dad actually liked a band called Little Feet he was just not into contemporary Christian music at all he was like we're gonna listen to
My 1970s music.
So he was kind of an odd one.
But a lot of dads his age, and especially a lot of moms, were like, do not listen to, quote unquote, secular music, which just really means mainstream music.
And then a lot of people involved in contemporary Christian music were trying to find ways to create soundalikes to mainstream music that would be imbued with conservative evangelical messages.
Sometimes it worked all right.
You know, like, for example, Christian, you know, kind of gory details about the crucifixion could actually fit pretty well in a death metal song.
You know, like, it's not completely foreign to the genre, but if you're going to have a pop song about not having sex, it doesn't work quite as well because most pop songs are actually about having sex, you know?
So some of it worked better than others.
So, I promise we're going to keep it together, but for me, the very personal memories of that, there's two.
One is Sixpence, None the Richer, Kiss Me.
Oh, yes.
Scandalous.
Right?
And yet, it was somewhat sweet, because it was like, we're kissing.
In my mind, as a Southern Californian evangelical convert who didn't have parents who were directing the show at home in terms of religion, that was like, yeah, we're going to kiss, but we're not going to do the
The other is A Walk to Remember, Mandy Moore, who I think wants to remake A Walk to Remember, get a reboot going, and that was like such a love story, they were like very tender, but they were not sexual, you know what I mean?
There was attempts to do the, like, pop thing without it being sexual, but you're right, it's hard to do.
I have so many questions, but Dan, I know that Leah mentioned death metal.
I know you have a bunch of things you want to ask.
So, yeah, I'll throw it to you.
Before diving way in there, I want to pick up on this theme, because this is something we've talked about a lot.
I talk about this with students.
Was the sort of evangelical creation of this like parallel subculture, right?
This whole like, I don't know, like one-to-one correspondence of what quote-unquote the secular world can do.
And as you highlight in your book, I think it was a very white middle class kind of, you know, subcultural sort of parallel.
But that's what always stood out to me because I was way over on like the metal side.
We were the ones that like looked down at everybody who listened to like Carmen or Amy Grant or something like that.
But I think that notion that you tied in of saying this was really central, I think it was, right?
Number one, it ties in, I think, with, and I'd be interested in your thoughts on this, this like long-standing first, you know, kind of early neo-fundamentalist coming out of the post-war period, evolving into contemporary fundamentalism.
That evangelicalism, or sorry, contemporary evangelicalism, evangelicals were always into whatever at the time felt like the best way to communicate, right?
So it was radio, and then it was TV, and I feel like the whole Christian music as its own sort of genre was one of those things.
The marketing, the marketing of faith and spirituality.
I mean, that has figured in, I'm thinking of Sopranos, right?
If anybody remembers Tony Soprano's sister was like, we're going to make a Christian album because like it's just easier to get in the market.
It's a South Park episode where they start like a Christian band, like sort of that piece of it.
But I think also for me, when I was in that evangelical world, Brad mentioned cringeworthy stuff.
Here comes something sort of cringeworthy.
Yay!
I love a good cringe story.
One of my selling points, because I was this big, burly...
Like badass Christian guy.
So I was like the guy that was like, you know, looked tough and looked whatever, but I could read Greek and Hebrew and I was like a Bible major and like, you know, whatever.
But I had this line where I was like, well, the only thing you can't do as a Christian, you know, you can do as a secular person is sin.
Like, you know, like you can be as cool.
I know that's awful.
Like, anything you can do, we can do.
And so I had, like I said, the metal side of my mind, like sort of all genres except ska, just never did ska.
But from like alt-metal, punk, Brad can shrug all he wants, in and out, ska, whatever.
I'll get the shots in while I can.
All the way over to, like, death metal, hardcore, like, you name it.
I had, like, hundreds of Christian CDs.
I would make the monthly circuit of, like, the Christian bookstores.
And for people who live in a different era, like, the whole phenomenon of... That was a huge hub, yes.
Yeah, of the Christian bookstore.
All of that.
But, I mean, for me, it really was.
It was, like, whatever band you were into, it was like, I can find somebody who's doing that.
I can find somebody who can, like, match that scent.
And they often didn't.
I was an intellectual guy so it was like it was all about the lyrics like oh let's look at the lyrics and it was yeah as you said some of those really gory details about the spear stabbing Jesus or you know all these different kinds of things.
But, I don't know, I'm curious if you have more thoughts on that, this creation of this parallel subculture, and I feel like that's why, at least in part, it was, as you say, such a central piece for a lot of people within that kind of Christian world, and not sort of a peripheral thing, because it really was this, we live in this world and we can sanctify it.
It's like a sanctified form of the secular world.
Yes, and I'm so glad you brought up even just the word sanctified, I think is perfect because it shows the holiness impulse.
So one of the things that I observe is how those three groups, four if you count Charismatics as well, and I do, but how those groups become constitutive of quote-unquote evangelicalism, so holiness people.
So the idea that That it is the Christian duty to go out into the public sphere and to make it holy is like a, you know, a core Nazarene idea.
And the idea that you would create, I think of this as a pretty large-scale experiment with catechesis or, you know, training up Christians Through mass media and through consumerism.
And of course, there's no surprise that it happens during the American century, right?
So the only reason why we have these communities, these predominantly white Baptist, Pentecostal, and holiness people in the early 20th century, the only reason why we know their songs is because there were some tech innovations that happened to where Southern middle class people had access To creating mass media, because prior to that, it was too expensive to print.
So really only like these elite hubs, Philadelphia and New York, were producing most of the, you know, like printed music.
But all of a sudden in the early 20th century, you have this opportunity where these groups are able to actually create very specific visions of the Christian life and then to sell them.
And I, you know, I wish I could have written about all the other forms of media that were happening at the same time.
I try to nod to them here and there in the book, but one of the things that you brought up was the Christian bookstore.
And I think you can't underestimate the, I have to give a shout out to Daniel Vaca's work on the evangelical Print publishing and in a book called Evangelicals Incorporated.
I'd love for our books to be read together.
You can't underestimate the central nature that that media hub played in creating evangelicalism.
You know, very few people just went into a bookstore and bought books.
They bought all kinds of other things.
They bought film, a little bit of film.
The film business really has developed, I think, since the early aughts in the 2010s.
It's really ascended.
But, you know, there were lots of VHS tapes you could go in and get a, you know, instead of watching Sesame Street, you could watch a Dobson-sponsored film or even, and this is fascinating to me, a Latter-day Saints-sponsored film.
They did really well in the film business, that's a whole other story.
But then you would buy a t-shirt, you would buy a self-help book, a novel, you know?
I found a way to squeeze in some stuff about evangelical Amish novels.
That became a huge thing for... So I think of it as An attempt to, you know, there are traditional Christian ways of making other Christians and this is a new way.
The idea that you raise them in a hopefully discreet world, media world, which of course that's never going to last because media technology continues to develop and one of the most devastating developments of course was the internet and File sharing, and then of course, streaming technology has disrupted that even more to the point where it's really not possible.
But in the late 80s and early 90s, for many young people who were raised in that world, it was possible to live in a fairly discrete world.
And in fact, it was encouraged.
To be in a discrete bubble while in the wider world.
So, you know, for example, there's tons of songs and books about existing in a public school, but not, you know, being in the world, but not of it.
So, you know, your friends are listening to, I'll date myself here, but, you know, your friends are listening to Nirvana, but you are listening to, you know, this other band.
It might be Audio Adrenaline, it might be Jars of Clay or something like that.
Never apologize for mentioning Nirvana.
Come on.
Don't apologize.
I'm from the Pacific Northwest.
You know, you're listening to Alice in Chains or something like that.
No, but there's bands to apologize for from our youth, but Nirvana is not one of them.
They hold up.
I will stand by it.
Come on.
Come on.
Yeah.
Just tied in with that thing, I think another piece of it for me, I feel like I'm going to be all about the Crims this entire segment.
I love Crims!
The role in proselytizing, because we've talked about that, Brad and I, a lot, and you know there's this evangelical, this huge imperative need to win converts.
And so one of, like, the passages that probably motivated everybody in that was, you know, there's this passage where the Apostle Paul says he's become all things to all people so that he could win some to Christ.
And I remember when I would run into the people who were like, well, you can't listen to that.
That's bad music, whatever.
And, you know, I'd be like, I'm just, it's just, it's just me and Paul.
I'm just being all things to all people.
These people won't listen to Amy Grant.
They're not going to listen to, like, whatever, but they'll listen to, they'll listen to Stavesacre.
They'll listen to Strongarm.
They'll listen to, like, you know, Whatever.
They'll talk to the guy with, like, the big burly guy with the shaved head.
I've talked about this other times.
I had a wallet chain on one side and a Bible with a chain on the other that I wore.
Leah!
Two chains!
Two chains, Leah!
He was the original 2 Chainz before the hip-hop artists.
Is there a picture of you in this?
Oh, I would love to see it.
I don't think that there is.
The whole Bible?
Or just like a New Testament?
No, it was a whole, but I shopped around to find one that was kind of small enough that it would work.
I've got to own who I was and who I am.
I've just got to live with it.
But that dimension of The way I would look at it now is it was almost like you can convert but you don't have to change.
Or like, not too much.
And of course the sociologists of religion and evangelicalism look for a long time about creating this in-group identity that's not so divergent from broader culture that you just feel weird or you get labeled as a cult or like whatever.
And I feel like it was a huge tool for that of drawing others in as well.
So creating evangelical identity, but trying to win others over to that, you know, within those contexts in which individuals existed.
You know, I'm glad you brought that up.
I had two thoughts in response to that.
One is that the music of contemporary Christian music was a really efficient way of drawing.
It's overwhelmingly Christian.
Of course, it's American, and so for most of the 20th century, most Americans would identify as Christian in some way, shape, or form.
But a lot of mainline young people We're brought into the evangelical fold through this media, through the culture of it.
This is very anecdotal, but I had a lot of, I talked to a lot of people who were, for example, you know, raised Presbyterian or something, but went to a summer camp where they saw some band.
And then I have one funny story from a listener who said, you know, I had a Methodist mother and a Catholic father.
I went to a Baptist summer camp.
Then came home worried that my dad wasn't a Christian, that he wasn't saved.
And my mom was like, what happened to you here?
You know, so contemporary Christian music was a really efficient way of evangelicalizing a lot of mainline kids, you know, people from kind of more traditions that were not familiar with the norms of Baptists and Holiness people and Pentecostals and Charismatics. people from kind of more traditions that were not familiar But they became a part of that through the music first.
And it was, you know, I never went to a Christian music festival.
I have to say, you know, the cringe stuff, I think I've thought about it recently.
I think the reason why I have like a huge appreciation for cringe is because while everyone else was listening to pop music, really in my formative years, I was huge.
I was such a big theater geek and I was huge into Broadway music, which is another strange little community that is high on cringe stuff.
So when people tell me their contemporary Christian stories, I'm like, that is so sweet because, you know, my friends and I were like, we didn't You know, we were in the back room singing show tunes when everybody else was having a normal late 20th century teen, you know, adolescence.
So, I don't feel, you know, you like what you like, is what I'm saying.
You shouldn't feel ashamed of your two chains.
I love that so much.
I love that you tried to say it with a straight face.
Like, I appreciate the effort.
There's no getting around it.
It's so earnest, though.
That's so sweet.
Let me ask you one more question, Leah, before we go into the very personal stories here.
And it's really about things going the other way.
So on one hand, you really gave us, and the book does a wonderful job of this, of this history of what is really charismatic Christian music becoming rock and roll, and then a kind of feeling of we lost what we created to the secular world.
And some people got on board and said, well, we got to just keep going, and the Jesus people The mid-20th century evangelicals, Southern California, Bay Area, all over the country, they take rock and roll, they take contemporary music, and they run with it.
Okay.
Others, like your dad, said, nope, that's- I'm off.
I'm out, because they took what is God's music and they defiled it, so I'm out.
I'm thinking of my mom, who raised us on Elvis Presley.
And like this summer is going to the Elvis Vigil at Graceland as thousands and thousands of people continue to do every year, as I used to live in Memphis.
And so, uh, anyway, all very few months of that.
I want to talk about the nineties and the early two thousands of Christian artists going the other way, because when we were growing up in the nineties, it was always like, Hey, what if one of these Christian bands made it big in the secular world?
Wouldn't they do the work Dan just talk about?
Wouldn't they convert so many?
It created a lot of problems.
Like, you know, we can talk about Amy Grant.
We can talk about Switchfoot.
We can talk about all of the kind of Disney's young women, like the Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore.
Katy Perry is one of these that people don't realize.
Anyway, could you help us understand what happened when these Christian stars broke out of the the sanctified realm of the contemporary christian music scene burst onto the popular music scene and instead of converting everyone in fact there was just a lot of turmoil for most of the time save for i mean the most probably influential informative band for all three of us creed which i'm sure to this day is still in all top okay All right.
I'll edit it out, Dan.
Fine, I'll edit it out.
Fine.
He's like, I can tolerate a certain amount of cringe, but no more.
And Dan was probably listening to Creed on the way to work today, is my guess.
But anyway, OK, so sorry, Leah.
Serious question.
Serious question.
Yeah.
Right.
You know, OK, so I started working in the business, contemporary Christian music.
Probably one of the most serendipitous things to ever happen to me is when I lived in Nashville, I first got a job working at a coffee shop.
And at that coffee shop, one of my regular customers was a music producer whose name is Charlie Peacock.
And Charlie and his spouse, Andy Ashworth, were my regulars.
And eventually, Charlie asked me to be his assistant.
And I didn't really know, I'm embarrassed to say, I didn't know who he was at the time.
I learned really quickly.
But his career is much broader than contemporary Christian music, but he's a very thoughtful artist and producer who's worked in that business.
And when I started the book, I had a really long, fun dinner with Charlie and Andy, and I was running kind of the big ideas by then.
And we were talking about the issue of crossover, because if you don't know who Charlie Peacock is, he developed the band Switchfoot, so that's one of the most prominent crossover bands in the early aughts.
And so we were just going back and forth talking about this and, and he was, we were talking about Bob Dylan.
And so for those of you who don't, you know, your listeners who don't know, Bob Dylan went through a very evangelical, very charismatic experience.
And, and he was trained in the Christian tradition by a lot of the same people who were creating music that would go on to be contemporary Christian music.
And he essentially created a contemporary Christian music album.
And Charlie and I were talking about how the expectation at that time was that if Dylan had converted, all of his fans would convert too.
Which, you know, he's arguably, and I say arguably, the greatest songwriter in, I know people could argue with that, but he's in there.
You know, you always have to talk about Dylan if you're going to say that.
And so he had a huge fan base is what I'm saying.
And at the time, a lot of people in contemporary Christian music hoped that that would mean that their fans, his fans would convert.
And of course, we know that they didn't as a whole.
I mean, maybe a few did, but it wasn't like this massive, you know, like, if you have, and Charlie said at that time, you know, it's funny that we thought that that, you know, a lot of people at that time thought that that's what would happen.
And really, that's the model that went the dominant model of contemporary Christian music, which is that if you Have this celebrity figure, you know, who's big enough.
And when Amy Grant had, I think she's arguably one of the only true crossover stars, meaning that she had a base in evangelicalism and she took it into the mainstream.
Most conservative evangelicals, including people like Pat Robertson, were super proud of her because they felt that her success was their success, that she was going out into the public sphere, taking the worldly, secular world back.
And of course, that didn't happen.
There weren't mass conversions associated with immigrant concerts or anything like that.
But by the time you get to the 1990s and the early aughts, one of the things that I write about in the book is that the model was ultimately unsustainable for several reasons.
And one of the reasons was that Young people in the 1990s and early aughts started wanting to make music that was in the mainstream world.
So there's, I have a kind of a funny section where I actually cite an Onion article, which is hilarious, that talks about a guy who mistakenly thinks, he's mistakenly joined a Christian band.
He doesn't understand that they are Christian.
And so he talks about like, Yeah, I keep wondering why we're not like, where are the groupies?
And they're like, Oh, no, I'm saving myself, you know, so he's confused.
And that I think the only reason why the Onion could write an article like that, and people would think it was funny, related, same thing with like the Simpsons making fun of Christian music or Family Guy or whatever, is because everyone knew what it was.
It was like a thing in that era.
But a lot of young people Understood.
So the core customer, the core consumer of most of contemporary Christian music was thought to be evangelical teens.
But the core customer, the person actually buying it, was the mother of said evangelical teens.
And moms, I'm a mom, My children, I do not have cool tastes.
I'm like literally listening to very depressing 1990s grunge rock because that's the music of my youth.
I love it, you know?
But my kids are not going to think that's cool.
Stop apologizing.
That's great music.
Stop apologizing.
It's great.
Universally great.
There are some things you could apologize.
Scott, that's great music.
We're not denigrating that on this podcast, so I'm sorry to interrupt you.
Having been in the Pacific Northwest, you can play the Authenticity card, right?
That's right, that's right.
You can be like, these are my bands.
I'm no like, yep.
My bands, my bands, yeah.
Yep, you're there.
And also Broadway music.
But anyway, so yeah, I mean like, you can't, moms, you know, youth culture, American youth culture and American pop music, are like parenting and parent culture is the oppositional other, you know, to that.
So there was something within the model of making contemporary Christian music that was just never very sustainable.
A lot of people grew out of it.
I would argue, Dan, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this, but in the book, I argue that a lot of the fringe music, like the death metal, ska, punk, that kind of, and early forms of Christian hip hop were successful because they existed outside of that model I mean, they were never as successful at sales.
So Carmen always outsold death metal, for example.
But the reason it was more sustainable over time because it was essentially peer-to-peer music.
So it was young people making music for other young people, not Parental, parental figures making substitutes for their children.
And so it just, it came across, it was more successful over time, I think, because it conformed to mainstream pop music norms.
Like it needs to be young people.
It's why Taylor Swift, I saw this thing that, you know, like younger teens maybe aren't as into Taylor Swift.
Why?
Because their mothers love Taylor Swift.
You know, like there's just always going to be, that's always going to be a part of it.
Sorry, just one more irony of all of this that I feel like ties in with that pop culture thing.
Your point about the metal, I think, is really interesting, just as a side thing that there's still some of that.
I mean, everything streams now and stuff, but you still have bands that they're never going to get played on the radio, right?
So, like, you can find them on Spotify and stuff.
But you're still hearing about him through other pathways, right?
And so there isn't the same kind of thing.
But the other one is the attractiveness of artists.
Like a piece of purity culture, if we map the purity culture onto the Christian music piece.
Is that the purity culture sell only worked if they were like hot people that could have sex?
Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith are the examples you really use, right?
Anyway, sorry.
Yeah, just that sort of notion that like it had to be somebody so that you still had the same sort of attractiveness factor that you had like in regular pop music, which means you also had the sexism that you get in regular pop music.
A form of ageism, especially for female-identified artists, right, who kind of age out of that kind of heteronormative, you know, fantasy model or whatever.
So I think all of those factors were in there as well, impacting a lot of that music and a lot of those artists of that era.
And someone who I cite many times in the book, Sarah Mosliner, who I know I have to give a shout out to the multiverse of your scholars, your scholar friends.
But yes, purity culture, it's really interesting.
One of the things that I tried to show is how if you wed evangelical Christianity to marketing and marketing culture, You see the theology doing what markets do, which is as they prosper, they consolidate and they homogenize over time.
So where there is, I would argue that there was more ideological diversity in the early years of the industry, but as it gets more and more profitable, those more fringe voices find their way outside of the industry.
They're still out there, you know, saying things and making music, but you're not going to see them selling a lot of records over time.
You see the The consolidated version of that, you really see that when it comes to commentary about evangelical women and their bodies.
So, you know, there was kind of an early trend where you'd have a song about waiting for marriage.
But as the business grew and as evangelicals started to really hone ideas about purity and purity culture in the 1990s, the message gets even more Extreme and even more pointed.
So for example, it's not just that you want to be a virgin before you're married, which was like a common, you know, value among many, not just evangelicals in the early 20th century, mid 20th century.
But once you get to the 1990s and the early aughts, you have messaging about you don't even want to date a person.
I write in the book about how the creator of one of the most profitable books about purity culture, I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris.
I talked with him for the book and he shared with me about how he was at a contemporary Christian music concert that was a part of a True Love Waits event in Washington, D.C.
And he was so stirred by what he heard and what he experienced as a teenager that he was like, I need to write about this.
And so he wrote a book that became a really, really important part of creating purity culture at a CCM event.
But, you know, as his work developed, the restrictions around, you know, how teens should behave with one another, especially young women, got more and more tight.
And so, yeah, it's fascinating to watch how those ideas grow with the market itself.
And eventually, you know, like many markets, they doubled down on a customer that was a shrinking demographic.
So, you know, white suburban, conservative white suburban moms that were known as the marketing persona Beckys.
And so when that happens, of course, markets decline.
And that's essentially what happened with contemporary Christian music.
But the Charismatics, of course, found another place for that.
And the book that, toward the end of the book, I chart how worship music has found new heights of prosperity.
So The media-making and the idea that you create Christians through media lives on.
It's just not in this business as much anymore.
I think that's one of the great features of the book, is that you really begin in the charismatic universe, and then you end there, you know, January 6th, and other ways that is manifest how the charismatic—oh man, too much iced coffee.
Charismatic, charismatization of evangelicalism and American Christianity is on full display in the music today.
Matt Taylor talks about this with the popularity of the NAR and the spiritual warfare motifs, but I think you see this in the music and the style of praise and worship.
The ways that people are demonstrative, the ways that people are willing to express themselves in bodily form when they sing church songs, that is a sign of the charismatic influence on American Christianity writ large, and you do a fantastic job as a scholar of Pentecostalism fleshing that out in the book.
One more point is also that, you know, those peer-to-peer groups that were not selling to Becky, the punk groups, the skog bands that were playing in the basements of churches, They were often the ones with the anti-American imperialism message, whether it's Five Iron Frenzy or MXPX.
They were a little bit anti-Americanism, which you would never find at Lifeway Bookstore.
You were never going to walk into Lifeway and see prominently displayed a punk band singing about how the American empire is a problem.
And so I think that's something else here that's really interesting.
Thank you.
Well, that part was really funny.
I actually talked to Leonore Tagatil, who is otherwise known as Jeff from Five Iron Frenzy.
And I asked her, how did you, you know, they have a song that's basically just an outright repudiation of Manifest Destiny and American imperialism.
And I asked her, like, how did you all were playing youth groups?
How did you even get away with that?
And she said something funny.
She said, well, I mean, you know, she said, like, I don't know that moms liked the sounds of the music, but also she said a lot of times they were listening with headphones.
And so they sort of got around it.
But you would never have music meant for a minivan.
You know, that would have been Around the same time that Stephen Curtis Chapman was singing The Great Adventure, which uses all kinds of American Western romanticism to talk about the evangelical gospel.
So you have these two songs kind of going on at the same time.
And I think she speculated the only reason why is because the kids were wearing headphones.
And that seemed like a that seemed actually like a pretty good explanation to me.
Well, we, I feel like just because we lived so much of this, we, if we're not careful, we're going to keep you here for way longer than, uh, we, we asked you to be here.
So we need to, we need to wrap up, but we do need to get to Dan.
So every bonus episode we do, we have a story.
One of the first one was about Dan getting arrested, uh, Dan Two Chains Miller getting arrested in a parking lot, wearing his two chains.
Uh, another one.
And the next person praying for my deliverance.
Oh, wow.
What a story.
Another one was me as a youth pastor launching live fish with a water balloon launcher in a way that really was a mix of Antigone, the Book of Ezekiel, and Lord of the Flies.
Wow, that's high art.
That is wow.
Yeah, at the time, that's what I thought, as a 20-year-old person in Orange County, California.
Tonight, or today, we want to get into Dan Miller.
Before you have to go, Lee, if you can stick around, because Dan Miller was a death metal guy.
Dan Miller is still a death metal guy.
Dan, are you old enough to have been in a striper, or no?
No so I was so yeah the same thing that kind of killed the hair bands like the secular hair metal stuff kind of came along with like Petra and Striper and that.
So were you into Petra or no?
Only early like when I converted it was like kind of reaching for music I was but then I went into like heavier kinds of things and like hardcore was kind of my Hardcore what we now would call groove metal.
Like that was my, that was my main cup of tea.
But yeah.
Those of you who've never shared a room with Dan, like a space, like you've never been with him in a room physically, don't know that like when you stand us next to each other, I am 5'7 and however many pounds, I don't really want to talk about right now.
I have a new baby.
Okay.
I don't get out much.
And Dan is, what are you Dan?
6'1?
Right about six.
Yeah.
And in terms of your width, you're much burlier than I am.
My brothers and I have my mom's family's genes.
We're basically refrigerator-shaped people.
If I saw the Miller brothers walking toward me, I would think twice about it.
So here's where I'm setting this up, everybody.
You were a very eager participant in mosh pits in high school.
I don't think I would have gone in the mosh pit if I saw you in there.
I'd have been like, nope, this is not my weight class.
This is not a mosh pit I go in.
I need the welterweight.
So what happened?
So yeah, so it was really like high school, but like, You were at a Stavesaker concert, things got out of control, you had like nine Diet Cokes, what happened?
Every piece of like this evangelical subculture flows together here.
I went to college in Oklahoma.
I was way into this music, and there was this venue out by Tulsa that, I don't know that it only did Christian music, but lots of Christian metal acts would be there.
I don't remember how in the world we found out about stuff before the internet at this point.
I honestly have no recollection of how you would find out.
But yeah, so I went to lots of shows there.
There was this one, it was the one eventful night where there's some band playing.
It was kind of the opening act, and I'm in there.
And there's this dude just standing like right next to me you know with the hoodie and the hood up and the shaved head the kind of standard you know that was the kind of the standard metalcore look.
Straight edge?
Yeah and I realized after a while he's the lead singer of this band called Staveshaker which was this like kind of metal super group from different metal They were a big deal, man.
Steve Seeker was a big deal.
Yeah, so I was like hanging out with him.
We were just kind of like, eh, whatever.
But then they go up.
Yeah, so I go in the mosh pit.
And I was, like, not only was I big, but I was actually solid then.
Now I'm kind of marshmallow-y and, you know, middle-aged and, you know, all that stuff.
But I could, like, literally lift the end of a small car at that time.
Dan Miller used to be able to bench press 400 pounds, true or false?
Uh, that is true.
Could you have been in the power team?
Is that what you're saying?
That's right.
Yes.
I could never terraform.
Yes.
That was my limitation.
Help!
Okay.
But yeah, and we would mosh around.
He tried out.
He couldn't rip the phone off.
It was just everything about this evangelical weird parallel things.
We'd mosh, and there was one time when like there was a hard collision, not intentional, whatever, but like this guy's nose just like blows up.
And I'm feeling so bad but I mean we're like all Christian brothers hugging it out like helping each other like there was no picking on anybody who's down or anything like that but it was this this whole like weird parallel subculture and I was like fully immersed in it like it was like I say every every band hundreds of CDs like But yeah, and I had these random things.
I was telling Brad another really random story.
One summer in college, I had this job through the Southern Baptist Convention, and basically I moved around to different churches all summer, helping them with like programs and stuff.
And we were housed with local church people, and there was this elderly couple that me and the person I was partnered with for the summer were staying with.
And, like, her grandson was the lead singer of this, like, Christian metal band that I was, like, way into.
She had, like, the CD sleeve on the refrigerator and the magnet.
I kind of dated — dated is probably a strong term — this girl for a while whose cousin was the lead singer of Prayer Chain.
Wow!
That's a big deal.
Yeah, we got these, like, you know, Prayer Chain.
So, yeah, it was this whole, like, parallel world.
I just broke Brad again.
I like how you were still flexing, like, 25 years later.
Yeah, I just kind of dated a girl.
No, no, no.
Prayer chain.
I considered it dating.
I was kind of informed over time that we weren't.
Like, it was kind of... Yeah, it was that.
It was, uh... There's no flexing.
There's just cowering in the corner.
The Lord was leading her in other directions.
The Lord led her in very different directions for me.
Basically, the Lord led her in the opposite direction is what happened.
But yeah, so, like...
Like, looking at your book, everything about it is, like, this was me.
And you highlight this time frame of, like, the, you know, early 90s, early aughts is, like, the sweet spot.
That's when I was in all of it, so.
Yeah.
Do you have any — I have a story I can tell, but I also want to know, do you have any stories from — you were in, like, the inner sanctum of CCM for a while.
You have a window into CCM.
And there's probably a lot of stories you're not allowed to tell, so we're not asking you to tell stories you're not allowed to tell.
I like the NDAs, right?
But my guess is you saw some stars and some big names and, you know, did you give six-year-old Taylor Swift a lollipop or something?
Or, you know, you probably can't say.
Oh, I'll tell you what.
I used to sit behind the Cyrus family in church and In front of us was a very little girl who would go on to become Miley Cyrus and of course at the time her dad was the big star.
I have tons of stories.
You know my favorite was I was a huge Ben Folds fan in high school and Ben Folds used to come into the 21st Avenue Starbucks which is where I was a barista.
And was super funny and fun so I liked being in my mind I was Ben Folds barista you know like in that setting you would never remember that but Nashville is a kind of fun place to live because there are so many people that you know I was for the vast majority of that time I was in grad school but you know you see stars and it's Yeah, for sure.
It's a different vibe than LA.
Yeah, for sure.
So it's a little less, you know, the kind of celebrity culture is a little less heightened, so you see people in more normal circumstances.
But I think, I'm trying to think of, you know, the wildest-- OK, here's just a weird one.
I used to wait on this one guy who it turned out, I'm pretty sure, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but the legend in the restaurant was he was the one who wrote, "8675309EI," and, "Oh, And we would always be like, Jenny, Jenny.
I don't even know if that's true, but that's the kind of city it is, where you're like, oh, look, here's the guy.
Here's the guy.
He wrote that song.
You're in a city where it could be true, and that's all that matters.
Oh, gosh, I love it.
I love the magic of that.
Yeah, but I want to hear one of your stories, Brad.
Well, I really want there to be a story where Billy Ray Cyrus preaches, like, on Palm Sunday, and it's about the Garden of Gethsemane and an achy, breaky heart.
That's what I want.
Okay?
You know what?
I'll say this about him.
His hair looked fantastic in real life.
You would not believe.
That's what you want.
That's what you want right there.
Meet Your Heroes.
Fantastic.
Yeah, that's true.
In real life.
Well, yeah.
Could have been Mitt Romney, but I'm 5'7", and not Mormon.
Okay, so here's the thing.
So I'm at Oxford.
I'm in the throes of deconverting.
I'm like 24 years old.
I'm getting divorced.
I am not sure if I'm going to be like a high church Anglican, Episcopalian, if I'm going to be like a Baptist, a Methodist.
I don't know where I'm going to land.
And so I go home to visit one summer, and my friend, who's still one of my best friends in the whole world, says, hey, Isaiah, our friend from around high school in the old days, is playing at Diaper Room.
And Isaiah came from your world, Leah.
Isaiah and my other friend grew up at John Wember's church in Yerba Linda, basically.
Okay, okay, now we're talking.
Yeah, okay.
And at the Vineyard, the original Vineyard.
Right, that's a big deal.
So they were these folks who were from charismatic spaces but ended up in rock and roll.
So this guy, Isaiah, ends up being just a savant of a guitar player.
So he, by age 12, was going to Hollywood to play in clubs because there was bands that wanted him to play and all that.
So by the time we're in our 20s, it was like no big deal for Isaiah to kind of have been playing a dingy club here or there.
So we go to the Viper Room, which is famous because this is where Joaquin Phoenix overdosed.
Not Joaquin.
One of the Phoenix.
River Phoenix.
River.
River Phoenix overdosed.
And it's kind of a Hollywood place.
So it's like, all right, I'll go.
That sounds fun.
Let's do it.
We go and he plays in this band.
There's a really charismatic, beautiful, dominant lead singer and she was the sort of the whole band and everyone else is relegated to kind of just stand behind me and play.
Yeah.
And that's who he was dating at the time.
And so after the thing, you know, I'm kind of the friend of the friend and there's a couple of friend of friends there.
We kind of get invited, but we're like sitting at the table, like kind of adjacent to everyone, but like not, we're not really part of the crew, but we're kind of part of it.
We're trying to like throw in a comment to the, like the adult table.
And that person was Katy Perry.
Oh wow.
I'd love to hear that.
She was like one or two years out of Christian pop land and was just trying to be pop.
So she was about to go big.
So we were like six months from Katie being like the thing.
And you would have never known it because there was probably 75 people at that show The dinner we went to, I think, I mean, if you told me it was Denny's, I'd believe you.
I don't know if it was Denny's, but I think that's where we went at like 2 a.m.
after the show.
And the conversation was some of the most Grotesque and not-safe-for-work humor I've ever heard in my entire life.
You know what?
This is the thing you've got to know about Pentecostals and Charismatics.
We party hard.
We go one way or the other, but you go big or go home.
Okay, I have one last story.
So when I was at Vanderbilt Divinity School, one of my first friends that I made there was a guy named Marcus, and Marcus told me You know, when we first started, you know, you're just kind of like getting to know people.
And he was also raised Pentecostal.
I was raised Pentecostal.
We kind of found each other in a place like Vanderbilt.
And he said, we were talking just like getting to know people.
And he said, yeah, you know, I have some friends from church and they are, I've been helping manage their tour.
You know, they're, they're rock stars.
And you just kind of, in Nashville, it's like, oh, sure, everyone is, you know, everyone.
And I was like, well, who are they?
And this is before anyone had heard of them.
He said, oh, they're called the Kings of Leon.
And it's true.
It's true.
And they were right about to go really big.
So anyway, but I remember being a little bit iral when Marcus told me that.
I was really wrong.
But that's another set of Pentecostals that party hard.
That made it.
Yeah.
That's the thing.
That's the thing.
Go big or go home.
There was no halfway.
I feel like we could do this forever, and I'm really sorry if we've taken up more time than you have.
That was so fun!
The book is called God Gave Rock and Roll to You.
It's out now.
Oxford University Press.
It's a great read.
If you're somebody who didn't grow up with this, you're going to learn so much about American culture, American religion.
the ways that white conservative Christianity really had a huge influence in ways you probably don't know.
And if you did live this stuff, this will be a trip down memory lane.
It will help you place yourself in history.
It will help you place your experience in a movement that was really important in a lot of ways and still is.
And so it's a one-of-a-kind book, and so thankful you wrote it, Leah.
Your series is also out, Rock That Doesn't Roll, and everybody can find that on PRX, which is great and fantastic.
And your podcast is Weird Religion.
So anyway, lots of ways to link up with you and everything you're doing.
And thanks so much for stopping by.
Thank you all.
I'm such a huge fan of both of you and your work.
I really appreciate the opportunity.
Yeah, thanks so much.
It was great.
We didn't even get to Dan's tattoo, but we'll do it next.
Oh, next time, next time.
All right.
Thanks, Leah.
Talk to you later.
Thanks for listening to this free part of our Swag episode.
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