Upon this rock

In sixth grade, I transferred from Immaculate Heart of Mary Elementary School in Detroit to a public school in the suburbs. I missed singing hymns every morning, but I wasn’t done with Christian music.

In the 1970s, Jesus made his own big move into the secular world, backed by infectious tunes, electric guitars and drum kits. My new friend across the street, George, couldn’t stop talking about “Jesus Christ Superstar.” (He played it for me when his disapproving parents were gone.) A year later, I sang in a choral junior-high version of “Godspell.” 

Back then, I didn’t recognize the sweeping winds of cultural change that were penetrating my suburban world, but Michigan State University historian and religious studies Professor David Stowe explains it all in his new book, “No Sympathy For the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism.”

“Christian rock was a big force in keeping the baby boomers involved in the churches,” Stowe said in an interview last week. “They could have drifted away.”

In “No Sympathy,” Stowe assembles a wild cast of characters and bit players, from born-again Bob Dylan, joyous Stevie Wonder and gospel-toting Johnny Cash, to lesser-known names like Larry Norman and Lonnie Frisbee, recognized primarily in the “parallel universe” of Christian pop.

Along the way, he shows how the 1970s Jesus movement and the music it spawned set the stage for the Reagan Revolution, played a role in the rise of evangelical influence in American politics, and helped shape today’s polarized cultural landscape.

“The evangelical churches and megachurches were very successful in retooling themselves for baby boomers, and generation X, Y and up to today,” Stowe said. “Christian rock was a crucial part of that. It allowed Christianity to rebrand itself for a new generation.”

While teaching in Japan in the late 1990s, Stowe was invited to create an American culture course for undergraduates. He realized it might be the only such course many of the students would get, so he decided to concentrate on the two mainsprings of the national psyche: God and music.

“I thought, if they get a taste of American pop music and religion, they’ll really get a sense of what the United States is all about,” Stowe said.

The ambitious course grew into Stowe’s first book, “How Sweet the Sound,” a dizzying tour through American religious music from the hymns of early Puritans through the Shakers, Moravians, Mormons, Jews, and Buddhists to the mystic vibes of jazzmen like John Coltrane and Sun Ra.

The course and book came to an end with the 1970s Jesus movement and “Jesus Christ Superstar,” but it was clear to Stowe that another great story was waiting to be told. 

Oddly, it took a Japanese teacher to nudge him further into the world of Christian pop. One of Stowe’s assistants in Japan was a fan of Amy Grant, Christian pop’s biggest crossover star. “It was bizarre to discover this quintessential American Christian musical form from a Japanese guy,” Stowe said.

Stowe’s personal taste runs to jazz, but professionally, he’s interested in music as a “social practice,” not an “artifact.” Once he began to dig into the history of Christian pop, he found a wave of distinctively American religious feeling that compares with the Great Awakenings of the 1740s, 1810s and the early 20th century.

The story begins with the 1960s “Jesus freaks” of Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa in Orange County, the incubator of Barry Goldwater’s and Ronald Reagan’s political careers.

That’s where a barefooted, rebel Jesus stepped out of the southern California hippie culture, to a rock and roll soundtrack.

For young people who didn’t try sex and drugs, or already had their fill, the Jesus movement was a new way to rebel. Christian rocker Thom Granger is quoted in the book as calling it the “perfect rebellion.” 

“Not only was I able to stand up to (my dad), but I had the authority of God, supposedly,” Granger says. “It worked really well and made him absolutely livid.”

Using first-person accounts, Stowe shows how the early Jesus movement influenced a generation of evangelicals. Rick Warren, the best-selling author and Saddleback Church minister who spoke at Barack Obama’s inauguration, pops up early in the book, as a lifeguard at a summer Christian camp in California. Warren describes himself leading a string of youth revivals in 1971 “with the requisite Martin D-35 guitar, long hair and sandals.” 

As the Jesus movement grows, older preachers like Pat Robertson and Billy Graham look for ways to tap into the youth energy, resulting in strange episodes like Robertson’s unlikely generational alliance with New York Christian radio pioneer Scott Ross, whom Robertson describes as “a hippie-type DJ with a black wife.”

Around the same time that grassroots Christian rock sprouted in California, slicker East Coast product like “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” penetrated the rest of the country (including my junior high school). Before long, drum kits and amps were being hauled into churches across the country.

Stowe points out that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, God was all over the pop charts. Aretha Franklin scored with a blockbuster gospel album (“Amazing Grace”), Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” burned with apocalyptic visions, George Harrison topped the charts with “My Sweet Lord” and the Beatles sang of “mother Mary” in “Let it Be.”

“There was that extraordinary period when all these secular bands and artists were referencing Jesus in their songs,” Stowe said.

But the mainstream moment quickly cracked into a permanent divide. Material girls and material rappers took over the pop charts, and Christian rock seemed to float away on a floe of Miracle Whip.

“It became an industry with its own music companies, agents, and awards, called the Doves,” Stowe said. “It’s slick and commercialized.” 

Stowe called it the “final irony.”

“Music that had been created to break down boundaries between Christians and non-Christians ended up hermetically sealed in its own new niche, the parallel universe of Christian popular culture.”

It’s been a long, strange trip, but in what direction? Stowe cited two films, made 31 years apart, on the same subject, to dramatize the gulf between past and present.

In 1973, “Jesus Christ Superstar” was praised for bringing psychological complexity, and even authenticity, to the story of Christ. A generation later, the hippie Jesus was as old-fashioned as macram plant hangers, and a new Christ, with tight abs and a vengeful eye, was spitting blood on the screen in “The Passion of the Christ.”

“Those kids that were in their early 20s or teens in the early Jesus movement, probably listening to ‘Superstar’ on the sly, are now middle-aged folks bringing their kids to see ‘Passion of the Christ,’” Stowe said. “That’s a huge cultural distance, but it’s the same people.”

David Stowe
Author of "No Sympathy For the Devil"
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