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Rethinking Christian Rock

Christianity Today is running a short, entertaining essay on the history of Christian rock and roll, and it’s well worth reading. The author, Joel Heng Hartse, argues that Christian rock often wasn’t as far from the mainstream as most people think: Rock and roll is supposed to be the rebellion, and Christianity the establishment, and […]

Christianity Today is running a short, entertaining essay on the history of Christian rock and roll, and it’s well worth reading. The author, Joel Heng Hartse, argues that Christian rock often wasn’t as far from the mainstream as most people think:

Rock and roll is supposed to be the rebellion, and Christianity the establishment, and these assumptions have led many a lazy rock critic to write reviews and essays about Christian rock in which the thesis is, essentially, “Bwuh?!” The problem is, of course, that the rebellion and the establishment are never so well defined. Look at Larry Norman, whose 1969 debut album is sometimes called the first Christian rock record. Norman was a Jesus hippie, and neither the Christian establishment nor the music industry really knew what to do with him. His first record with the band People was originally titled We Need a Whole Lot More of Jesus and a Whole Lot Less of Rock and Roll. The record company retitled the album Love and the band fell apart. Norman went on to make solo records for decades, none of them particularly successful, but when he passed away in 2008, he was widely eulogized as “The Father of Christian Rock.” At the time of this death, Norman was working on an album with Frank Black of the Pixies and Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse. This certainly suggests that his influence was wide, but more importantly, if this album is ever released, the world will explode because it will be so weird and awesome.

I used to that I’d had to wait most of my life for an artist like Sufjan Stevens to come along and show that popular music influenced by the Christian faith didn’t have to be motivated by money or keeping up appearances or following mainstream trends in order to win converts—all of which are sins that “Christian music” as an industry has been guilty of at one time or another—but it’s comforting to know that there were people mingling Jesus with rock and roll before I was even born, and not just Larry Norman. Other obscure 60s and 70s artists like Judee Sill, Silmaril, The Trees Community, and many other bands you’ve never heard of made compelling pop/rock music with an undeniably Christian bent even before Christian record labels existed.

This is all true, but I think Hartse is still understating the level to which Christianity influenced rock and roll in the 1960s and ’70s. For instance, Tommy James and the Shondells were rocketed to fame primarily by sexual songs like “Hanky Panky,” “I Think We’re Alone Now,” “Mony Mony,” and “Crimson and Clover,” but their later hit “Sweet Cherry Wine” was a protest against the Vietnam War with the claim that “Only God has the right/to decide who’s to live and die.” After the band broke up, Tommy James embarked on a solo career, and his second album was entitled Christian of the World and dealt heavily with religious themes.

Other musicians of the era that featured Christian themes in their work include Jackson Browne,Van Morrison, and (of course) Bob Dylan, but the most explicit (and most unexpected) was Black Sabbath, the original heavy metal band fronted by Ozzy Osbourne. The legendary rock critic Lester Bangs made the same observation in a 1972 article when he wrote that Sabbath was “probably the first truly Catholic rock group, or the first group to completely immerse themselves in the Fall and Redemption: the traditional Christian dualism which asserts that if you don’t walk in the light of the Lord then Satan is certainly pulling your strings, and a bad end can be expected, is even imminent.”

This is most evident on their 1971 album Master of Reality, which with the exception of the pro-marijuana opener “Sweet Leaf,” could have been one of the first Christian albums. The second track, “After Forever,” is a sludge metal hymn to Jesus:

Have you ever thought about your soul – can it be saved?
Or perhaps you think that when you’re dead you just stay in your grave
Is God just a thought within your head or is he a part of you?
Is Christ just a name that you read in a book when you were in school?

[…]

Could it be you’re afraid of what your friends might say
If they knew you believe in God above?
They should realize before they criticize
that God is the only way to love.

Is your mind so small that you have to fall
In with the pack wherever they run
Will you still sneer when death is near
And say they may as well worship the sun.

Of course, most people did not think of Black Sabbath as a Christian band and justifiably so. Nevertheless, the band wrote far better Christian rock than most self-described practitioners of the genre.

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