the weird world of ccm AND STUFF
the weird world of ccm AND STUFF
THE WEIRD WORLD OF CCM AND STUFF
August 26, 2026
By the time I became a Christian in the early 1990s, Contemporary Christian Music was already a world of its own. It had record labels, radio stations, magazines, awards, bookstores, festivals, and concert circuits. Artists like Michael Card, Steven Curtis Chapman, Amy Grant, and many others weren't simply musicians who happened to be Christians; they belonged to a recognizable category called Christian music. And there was another category: secular music.
Those categories seemed perfectly natural to me at the time. Christian music was good, while secular music was worldly. Many of us took this seriously enough that we got rid of our secular CDs after becoming Christians because we believed filling our lives with Christian alternatives was part of becoming more faithful. There was certainly something good behind the desire to exercise discernment about what we consumed, but looking back, I think we were doing something more than that. We had constructed two different cultural worlds and assumed that spiritual maturity meant increasingly living in one rather than the other.
Early in my Christian walk, when I was around nineteen or twenty, I became so immersed in this sacred/secular way of thinking that I could become suspicious of a Christian song simply because it didn't explicitly mention Jesus. A song could talk about love, hope, kindness, justice, or caring for others, and rather than simply asking whether those things were true and good, we could ask whether they were distinctly Christian enough.
I remember the kinds of tests we could apply: "A Catholic could agree with this." "A Muslim could agree with this." Or perhaps the ultimate indictment: "Even an atheist could agree with this!" Somehow, the ability of someone outside our particular Christian world to recognize something true in a song could become evidence that the song wasn't sufficiently Christian. If everybody could agree with it, we suspected that the artist must have removed the offensive parts of Christianity in order to gain wider acceptance.
Looking back, that's a very strange standard. If an atheist agrees that we should care for the poor, does that make caring for the poor less Christian? If a Muslim believes husbands should faithfully love their wives, has marital faithfulness become religious compromise? Does a Christian songwriter need to insert the name of Jesus into a love song before he can tell his wife she's beautiful?
Christianity certainly makes some profoundly exclusive claims. Jesus is Lord. Christ has risen. God has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Those claims cannot simply be blended into generic spirituality without losing something essential. But it doesn't follow that every true thing a Christian says must be something only a Christian could say. There is a great deal of truth, goodness, beauty, love, grief, joy, and ordinary human experience that Christians share with everyone else simply because we are all human beings living in the same world.
Interestingly, I had encountered this attitude before I ever became a Christian. I remember hearing Christians criticize Amy Grant for her crossover success, particularly around Heart in Motion. Some regarded her mainstream popularity as evidence that she had compromised. She wasn't singing explicitly Christian songs, she was appearing on mainstream radio, and she was reaching an audience far beyond the Christian music market. To some Christians, crossing over into "the world" seemed inherently suspicious.
As a non-Christian looking in, I found that attitude incredibly off-putting. My reaction was basically, What's wrong with this? She was a talented musician making successful pop records and building a career. I didn't hear anything particularly objectionable on the album. "Baby Baby" certainly wasn't threatening Western civilization. If she could make music people enjoyed, sell records, and build a life for herself and her family, I couldn't understand why Christians were angry about it.
What bothered me wasn't Amy Grant's music. It was the snootiness of Christians who seemed bothered that someone from their world had succeeded in mine. There was something about that attitude that made Christianity seem unnecessarily small and suspicious of everything outside itself. Apparently it wasn't enough for Amy Grant to remain a Christian while making mainstream music; her music itself had to continuously announce that she was one.
The irony is that after becoming a Christian, I eventually absorbed much of the same way of thinking that had once turned me off.
For me, there was another important layer to all of this: eschatology. I came into Christianity steeped in the popular dispensational end-times world of Hal Lindsey, Jack Van Impe, Tim LaHaye, and similar teachers. The Rapture could happen at any moment, the Antichrist was coming, Europe might be the revived Roman Empire, technology could be preparing the way for the Mark of the Beast, and somewhere on the horizon was a coming one-world religion.
When you view the world through that framework, cultural compromise takes on enormous significance. A Christian artist removing explicit references to Jesus wasn't necessarily just making a different kind of record. Perhaps Christianity's exclusive claims were being softened. Christians finding common ground with Catholics, Muslims, or other religious groups could look like religious distinctions were being erased. Something that appealed equally to Christians and non-Christians could become evidence that the truth had been watered down to make it acceptable to "the world."
Once you've accepted the larger narrative, the individual pieces fit into it remarkably easily. A Christian pop song that didn't mention Jesus wasn't just a pop song anymore; it could become another tiny piece of evidence that the world was being prepared for Antichrist. That's an awful lot of theological freight for "Baby Baby" to carry.
Looking back, I don't think this was fundamentally a problem with our musical taste. It was a way of viewing the world. We had been trained to look suspiciously at common ground because agreement between Christians and non-Christians could itself become evidence of compromise. If the world was getting darker, the faithful remnant was getting smaller, and apostasy was increasing, then maintaining clear boundaries between "us" and "them" felt increasingly important.
Within that framework, separation itself could begin to feel like faithfulness. If mainstream culture rejected a Christian artist, perhaps that proved the artist was standing for truth. If mainstream culture embraced a Christian artist, the immediate question could become, What did they compromise? Success outside the Christian world could actually make us suspicious, which is a peculiar way to understand Christian witness when the stated goal was supposedly to reach people outside the Church.
This is part of what makes the beginnings of Contemporary Christian Music so fascinating to me now. When I look back at someone like Larry Norman, I'm not convinced he was trying to build the isolated Christian music industry that eventually emerged. His famous question, "Why should the devil have all the good music?", can be heard in two very different ways. One interpretation says, "The world has rock music, so Christians need our own version." But Norman seems to have been saying something much closer to, "Who decided rock music belonged to the devil in the first place?"
That's a very different proposition. Norman wasn't merely trying to give Christians a safe substitute for mainstream rock. He wanted to make music in the public square as a Christian, which meant he could sing about Jesus while also singing about racism, war, hypocrisy, loneliness, sex, politics, poverty, and the confusion of being human. His Christianity informed his art without requiring every song to function as a miniature evangelistic tract.
There is an interesting historical irony here. The man asking why the devil should have all the good music helped inspire a movement that eventually developed its own record labels, radio stations, stores, magazines, awards, festivals, and concert circuits. Instead of Christians reclaiming their place within the larger musical culture, we sometimes created another musical culture beside it. We didn't merely make music as Christians; we created Christian Music as a separate consumer category.
That makes me think about someone much earlier: Blind Willie Johnson. Johnson recorded "John the Revelator" in 1930, and it is unmistakably Christian while also being unmistakably blues. We might call it "gospel blues" today, but Johnson didn't need an entirely separate Christian cultural ecosystem in order to sing it. He was a blues musician singing about Revelation because Christian faith was part of the world from which his music emerged.
Johnny Cash could similarly sing "Folsom Prison Blues" and also sing "Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?" Nobody needed to determine which Johnny Cash was the Christian one. The same person could sing about prison, trains, murder, love, sorrow, Jesus, judgment, and redemption because all of those things belonged to the human world he inhabited. His faith didn't require him to pretend the rest of human existence didn't exist.
Somewhere along the way, however, evangelical Christianity became remarkably good at building a parallel culture. We had Christian bookstores, Christian radio, Christian record labels, Christian magazines, Christian concerts, Christian T-shirts, and eventually Christian versions of popular bands and musical styles. There was a lot of good in that world, and some extraordinary music came out of it that I still love. I don't want to dismiss the entire CCM movement or pretend nothing valuable happened there.
But there was also a cost. Once we had created a self-contained Christian cultural ecosystem, artists could be judged by how well they remained within it. Crossing outside the boundary could be interpreted as compromise, while staying inside the boundary could become evidence of faithfulness. The marketplace itself began reinforcing theological assumptions about where Christians belonged.
This eventually created a strange evangelistic paradox. We produced music that we said was intended to communicate Christianity to the world, distributed it through Christian bookstores, played it on Christian radio stations, advertised it in Christian magazines, and performed it primarily in churches for audiences made up overwhelmingly of Christians. Then we encouraged Christians to bring their non-Christian friends.
We had effectively created a separate musical world and then invited outsiders to come visit us there. Sometimes the message almost became, "Hey, we have cool music too!" But the people who already had their own music weren't necessarily looking for our alternative version of it. In trying to protect ourselves from the world, we had also made it harder for our artists to participate naturally in the cultural spaces where everyone else already lived.
Perhaps Larry Norman's original instinct was better: go make music in the world. Not because the Gospel should be watered down, not because Jesus' exclusive claims are embarrassing, and certainly not because Christians should uncritically absorb everything their culture produces. Rather, Christians can participate confidently in the world because the world doesn't belong to the devil in the first place.
"The earth is the LORD's, and everything in it." — Psalm 24:1
Today I no longer find the Christian/secular distinction particularly helpful when talking about music. I certainly believe there is sacred music. Music written for the worship of the Church has a particular purpose, and a Eucharistic hymn is doing something different from a love song. But that doesn't make the love song ungodly simply because it isn't intended for use in worship.
Perhaps a more useful distinction is between that which reflects what is true, good, and beautiful and that which distorts or opposes those things. A Christian can write about Jesus, his wife, grief, aging, injustice, friendship, a beautiful landscape, or the experience of losing someone he loves. He can sing the blues because sometimes life hurts, and he can occasionally write something completely ridiculous simply because laughter is part of being human. None of those things requires inserting Jesus into the third verse to make the song Christian enough.
The strict sacred/secular binary also seems increasingly difficult to reconcile with Christianity's doctrine of creation. If God created the world, then beauty belongs to him. Human love belongs to him. Music belongs to him. Laughter belongs to him. Food, friendship, marriage, work, rest, creativity, and ordinary human pleasure belong to him. The Christian doesn't need to smuggle Jesus into these things in order to make them legitimate because their goodness already comes from God.
Of course, all of these things can become distorted. Love can become lust, ambition can become greed, beauty can become vanity, and music can celebrate things that destroy human beings. That's where Christian discernment becomes important. But discernment is different from separation. The question isn't simply whether something came from the Christian side of the cultural fence; the question is whether it is true, good, beautiful, honest, and worthy.
I once thought that if a Muslim or atheist could agree with a song, something was probably missing. Today I think almost the opposite. If something is genuinely true, I shouldn't be surprised when another human being recognizes it. Christianity doesn't teach me that unbelievers inhabit someone else's creation. They live in God's world too, experiencing love, grief, beauty, injustice, friendship, betrayal, birth, death, laughter, and longing just as I do.
The Christian artist doesn't need to be frightened by that common humanity. Christianity gives us some things to say that are unmistakably and exclusively Christian, and when we have those things to say, we shouldn't be embarrassed to say them. Jesus is Lord. Christ is risen. Those aren't generic spiritual sentiments, and I have no interest in watering them down to make them universally acceptable.
But not everything I have to say needs to be the Nicene Creed set to a guitar.
So perhaps instead of asking, "Is this Christian enough?" or "Could an atheist agree with this?", I've learned to begin with some simpler questions: Is it true? Is it good? Is it beautiful? Is it honest about what it means to be human?
Sometimes the answer will lead explicitly to Jesus, and when it does, we shouldn't be embarrassed to say his name. Sometimes it will lead to a love song, a lament, the blues, a story about growing older, or something that simply makes somebody laugh. That's okay too.
Maybe Christians don't need our own version of the world.
Maybe we need to remember that it was God's world all along.
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Mike