Christian Rock

The genre of rock and popular music that explicitly incorporates or mentions Christian themes.

There's often a perception that Christian variations are watered-down imitations of popular genres, typically with low production values, and sometimes bands just shoehorn Christianity into the lyrics to get played on gospel stations. The reality is quite different. As with any genre, production values and talent vary greatly between bands, but they're on average no more derivative than any group playing on mainstream radio. Additionally, Christian Rock is less The Moral Substitute than is popularly believed. Most often, it is simply a chosen way for its performers to entertain, enjoy themselves, and/or express their faith. People who are liable to condemn rock music simply because of its genre (without regards to its lyrical content) often don't listen to Christian rock, either. Some church groups (and Jack Chick) believe that all rock music, including Christian rock, is something to be avoided.

It should be noted that this genre can be as diverse as the secular form of rock music. Just as diverse. Everything from soft rock to the various forms of Heavy Mithril will be covered. And it's erroneous to assume the viewpoint/theology of any Christian band or its members, because Christian rock's theologies are as diverse and unpredictable as the entire population of Christians, which is pretty diverse.

Concerts often differ somewhat from regular rock or metal concerts. Because a band is Christian, parents will often allow younger children to go to their concerts. As a result, some concerts will be held at a lower decibel level (though there are still a great many that will send you home with ringing ears). Mosh pits are rare, and usually at smaller, late night concerts if at all.

Contrast with The Moral Substitute.

Compare Not Christian Rock (when music seems as though it could be Christian Rock, but isn't), "God Is Love" Songs.

It should also be remembered that an artist's personal religious affiliation can have absolutely nothing to do with what genre they sing in. Christian rock refers exclusively to music that is about Christianity. Christians may (and often do) sing in other genres as well.

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Music

• Bible Rap, or as its aficionados call it, "Holy Hip-Hop":

The Bible is the holy book So let's open it up and take a look You got Genesis/Exodus/Leviticus/Deuteronomy...

• • Bible Rap may be the most theologically-focused genre of Christian music. Witness Flame's "Who Can Pluck Us," a rap song about predestination, of all things: "For all those the Father chose in eternity past/ To be redeemed that simply means to be bought back".
    • Many people, on hearing Shai Linne for the first time, say that they got more solid doctrine from one album than an entire year of Sunday School.
  • On the other hand, some "Christian rappers" are basically the early days of Will Smith, remixed, with an occasional positive Christian vibe just because of their personal background. So basically if you like Will Smith you'll think these guys are OK and if you don't then you won't.
  • Gospel group Mary Mary is known for creating gospel songs that are different from the usual (a full choir with a preacher leading a la Kirk Franklin) and that are more like R&B songs with Christian lyrics, that actually are played on non-gospel R&B stations.
• Christian Heavy Metal.
  • Christian Death Metal.
    • For a straight Death Metal/Deathcore example, check out Impending Doom and their self-proclaimed "Gorship" style of worship to God through their music. If you look back in their discography, their first EP ("The Sin and Doom of Godless Men") is almost Noise.
  • Christian Black Metal. But since Satanic themes are practically part of the definition of the genre, this is called Unblack Metal. Black Metal fans are less than pleased with this, even when these bands otherwise have the same sound.
    • It doesn't help that the musical tone of black metal makes it pretty much impossible to talk about anything and not portray it in a completely twisted and evil light.
      • Really most Unblack Metal is mostly about what will happen to you in Hell if you aren't a good Christian. Basically a Logic Bomb for Jack Chick.
        • The whole "You will suffer in hell!" kind of Black Metal is pretty unheard of here in Sweden; our extreme Christian Metalbands (such as Pantokrator and Crimson Moonlight) focus more on loss, despair, philosophy and such, less preaching and more thinking, basically.
      • Although Antestor manages to pull it off rather well. Having just as many songs about despair, helplessness and suicide as they do about Jesus and God helps. And musically, they're regarded by many secular BM fans as one of the best Black Metal bands out there (by many of those who aren't part of the church-burning Serious Business portion of BM fandom, anyway). Funny enough, the drummer on their most recent album is from, of all bands, Mayhem (yes, THAT Mayhem).
        • Hardly surprising. Hellhammer (of yes that Mayhem) is about as prolific a drummer as you're likely to find anywhere. Wheel him in behind a kit and he'll keep hitting the thing until you make him stop. Seriously, go look up how many albums the guy's actually played on.
  • Rackets and Drapes, just Rackets and Drapes, called the christian version of Marilyn Manson, they definitely live up to that title. also the lead singer Kandy Kane admits to being a cross-dresser
  • Moral Orel had pious heavy metal playing on the radio.
  • In a strange twist, the metal band Vengeance Rising started as a Christian band, but the frontman and remaining member, Roger Martinez, later renounced Christianity and now seeks to make anti-Christian music.
• Christan rock band Skillet started out with songs that were not at all subtle about worshipping Jesus, but eventually turned their sound more mainstream, switching to lyrics that were kind of about Jesus.
  • To elaborate, lead singer John Cooper has stated in interviews that it is the band's desire to be relevant to Christians and non-Christians alike, but they're still very much a Christian band. Given that they still (as of 2009, at least) read from the Bible during concerts, that seems to indeed be the case and John does preach too.
• Let's not forget Andy Hunter and his contribution to the Need for Speed: Underground soundtrack, "The Wonders Of You". It is, in fact, Christian Techno.
  • And his contributions to the Matrix Reloaded trailer, and Alias, and Burnout Revenge, and The Italian Job... the list goes on. Seriously, Andy's probably the best techno DJ you've heard but never heard of.
• Stryper was a Christian hair metal band that hit near mainstream success in the 80s with their single "Honestly".
  • Occasionally used by hairband fans as proof that theirs is the Greatest Genre EVER: because Stryper is Christian rock, but are comparable in quality to most bands in the genre. The argument being, "Even Christian hairband is good, because we're just that awesome."
• Cezare Bonizzi is a Capuchin monk, with long flowing beard and vows of piety and all that... and he's also the lead singer of an Italian heavy metal band and is known as Brother Metal. He's appeared with such metal giants as Iron Maiden, Judas Priest and Slayer.
• Amy Grant started out making explicitly Christian pop music -- the albums Age to Age, Straight Ahead, Unguarded. At the end of The Eighties and the beginning of The Nineties, she left that genre for mainstream music. Lead Me On and Heart in Motion were the transitional albums with Heart in Motion containing the pop smash "Baby, Baby". She hasn't renounced the Christian music, but she's no longer specifically in that genre.
  • Whether Grant could be honestly said to have left Christian music is debatable. It's true that in the early part of The Nineties, she began downplaying her typical Christian subject matter in favor of songs with more universal themes, but she never quite abandoned it altogether; even Heart in Motion has two explicitly Christian songs, "Ask Me" and "Hope Set High". And at any rate, Grant has drifted back toward religious music in recent years; two of her last three albums have been collections of religious songs. And even at the height of her mainstream success, her albums were carried in both Christian and mainstream record stores.
• Switchfoot is somewhat on the fence, as most of their music does not explicitly reference Christianity, but some of it makes no sense until a Christian perspective is taken on the lyrics. "Dare You To Move" from the Learning to Breathe album is a good example. Jon Foreman (the group's lead singer and usual writer) is a Christian and his work does tend to reflect that fact.
  • Switchfoot was a little more obviously Christian with their first few albums; "The Beautiful Letdown" actually wasn't their first release, it was their fourth. Granted, their success since going mainstream would seem to prove that the "Christian rock" label narrows down your audience by a huge degree.
  • It's worth noting that the band rejects the label specifically because they feel that it excludes people who aren't Christians but would still enjoy the music. Their official stance is "The band members are Christians, it is reflected in the music, but the music is not written to be explicitly Christian in nature. We want to make music that everyone can relate to."
• Similarly, it's debatable whether Creed is Christian rock or simply post-grunge. If they're the former, then they're by far the most successful band the genre has ever seen.
• P.O.D. has probably had the most mainstream success of any Christian rock band (unless you count Creed within the genre). If anybody doubts that they're Christian rock, then listen to the lyrics of their hit "Alive", and get back to me. They were popular enough that, when frontman Sonny Sandovol named his daughter Nevaeh ("heaven" spelled backwards), that name quickly shot up from being unheard of to being one of the most popular baby names in the country. It's even on the page for The Red Stapler.
• Evanescence is a subversion. They were initially referred to as a Christian rock band, but they have publicly rejected the label, even asking for Christian music stores to stop selling their albums. It was a smart move on their part -- Christian rock bands usually don't go on to sell over fifteen million records internationally. Amy Lee was quoted on the other wiki as stating the Christian labeling was Ben Moody's thing. I think he left the group shortly after.
• Mutemath is a similar example. Their first EP was released under a Christian sub-label, so the band found a different company to sign with. They've since seen much more exposure, but their albums can still be found in Christian music stores. (Don't think they qualify as Christian rock? Go listen to "Peculiar People", read Isaiah 40:31 and get back to me.)
• Katy Perry used to be a Christian pop singer before switching to mainstream pop songs.
  • She's still a professing Christian, though, and even called Lady Gaga out for being too "blasphemous". Let that one sink in for a moment.
• Jessica Simpson, before she achieved mainstream success.
• Apologetix is a Christian parody band, a la "Weird Al" Yankovic. Al's drummer even played on one of their albums.
  • Their song "We're in a Parody Band" labels themselves as part Weird Al and part Billy Graham.
• Relient K is a Christian punk-pop band with a penchant for quirky lyrics and, early on especially, pop culture references. They've become a bit more vague, but they are still in the genre.
  • They even did a cover of "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" which - while not actually a religious song - was originally written by Christian cartoon show, Veggie Tales.
• One of the pioneers of the genre was Petra, founded in 1974. Their name is Greek for "rock", and that's pretty much the only descriptor of their style that's vague enough to remain accurate throughout their history (in the '80s alone, they went from sounding like Kansas to being a heavy metal band), with synthesizer-fueled pop-rock somewhere in the middle. They got a lot of flak early on for daring to play rock music (which many Christians at the time were still uneasy about), and levered a couple Take Thats to their accusers in response.
• KJ-52 is a comedy rapper as much as he is a Christian rapper.
• The band Red is a Christian rock band (although if you don't pay attention to their lyrics you wouldn't know). If you don't believe it, listen to "Already Over".
• Christian pop musician Carman (not Cartman, though he and his friends dabbled in this trope as well ... sort of). He is probably one of the biggest stars that the Christian music scene has ever produced, having sold over ten million albums and holding the records for the largest Christian concerts in history.
• Special mention needs to go to the band Mortification. They're an Australian death metal band (yes, I know it's covered above, but these guys need to be mentioned), probably most famous around these parts for doing the song "Livin' Like a Zombie" -- the song that plays during the shock video BME Pain Olympics. They're legends within both the Christian Metal and Death Metal scenes -- probably for being a very, very good Christian rock band.
• Welcome, my friends, to the world of Christian screamo.
• Neal Morse of the Prog Rock groups Spock's Beard and Transatlantic. After converting to Christianity, Morse produced the Christian themed concept album, Snow, with Spock's Beard, after which he focused on a solo career focused on his new found faith, often deviating from his prog rock roots, though he has produced several prog rock Christian concept albums, including ? about the tabernacle and Sola Scriptur about Martin Luther.
• The Newsboys: absurdly popular among Christians, unheard-of elsewhere. Which is too bad, 'cause their music is really catchy. (One word: "Shine")
• The Ur Example: 1972's "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" by Larry Norman, generally viewed as the godfather of Christian rock. The song was on the soundtrack for the Christian film A Thief in the Night, which is basically a Seventies version of Left Behind. Later on, Norman would grow disenchanted with the Christian music scene, claiming that it had become about "sloppy thinking, dishonest metaphors, and bad poetry," and joking that you could write a Christian pop song by taking a secular love song and replacing "baby" with "Jesus".
• Older Than They Think: Ricky Nelson was doing this as early as 1960 with his hit single "Glory Train."
• Five Iron Frenzy were a Christian ska band that gained a following in the mid-90's with secular audiences.
• Joy Electric and Starflyer 59, led by brothers Ronnie and Jason Martin, respectively, are funny cases in that their lyrics sound like Not Christian Rock bands, but when asked whether or not they're Christian bands, they always reply in the affirmative. Joy Electric eventually released an album in 1999 titled CHRISTIANsongs so everyone would stop asking him. Jason Martin, on the other hand, has explained that he's usually reluctant to write songs about God because he's afraid that name-dropping Jesus in a song that turns out crappy would just be disrespectful.
• Jars of Clay are easily one of the biggest bands in Christian Rock, and they also had some crossover success in the 90's with their first few albums. Initially they played acoustic rock; since then, they've been bouncing between rock and folk, re-tweaking their sound every other album or so.
• Family Force 5 deserves mention. "It's better than drugs/in fact it's sent from above" (from Love Addict") is a reference to God, if indirect/vague; they've played at Christian concerts, and they even mention God directly in "Peachy".
  • They also did a cover of the song "In My Minds Eye," originally done by DC Talk, mentioned above.
• Demon Hunter is an example of a relatively well known Christian Metalcore band. However, even listening to their lyrics, it's hard to tell.
• Michael W. Smith is one of the most popular artists in the history of Contemporary Christian music. He had some brief success on the pop charts in the early '90s with "Place in This World" and "I Will Be Here For You", but with his 1995 album I'll Lead You Home, he returned to overtly religious music and hasn't looked back since.
  • Steven Curtis Chapman is almost as popular.
• Christcore, a subgenre of Hardcore Punk or Metalcore, is pretty huge right now. Bands often included in it, officially or unofficially, include The Devil Wears Prada, August Burns Red, Mychildren Mybride, As I Lay Dying, Oh Sleeper, Underoath, Zao, Norma Jean, Attack Attack!, and Haste the Day, among others. It's becoming so mainstream that Norma Jean is playing at Mayhem 2010 with, for example, the decidedly non-Christian Lamb of God. Its fans are still just as likely to try to break your face in the pit as any other hardcore fans, though.
• Bob Dylan embraced the genre in the late '70s and early '80s, with his albums Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love.
• dcTalk was one of, if not the most popular Christian Rock in the mid-90's. They actually got their start in Christian rap and slowly evolved into pop-rock with a little hip-hop mixed in. They broke up in 2000 for what was supposed to be simply an 'intermission,' but they haven't even toured together since 2002. Well, so much for that.
  • And they recorded an absolutely fantastic grunge song that just happened to be overtly Christian. Its name? "Jesus Freak".
  • The main reason for their never getting back together is because they got involved in other things. Toby Mac launched a very successful career as a Christian Rapper, while Michael Tait started his own band Tait, and recently became the new frontman for Newsboys. Which then did a cover of Jesus Freak.
• Another seminal figure in Christian Rock is guitarist Phil Keaggy. There's a popular incorrect urban legend about an interviewer asking Jimi Hendrix how it felt to be the world's greatest guitar player. He responded by saying, "I don't know, you'll have to ask Phil Keaggy." Incorrect because Keaggy was still unknown by the time Hendrix died.
• Day of Fire is a repeatedly stated Christian Rock band, whose songs are so rock that it's hard to notice the christian references, unless they directly throw it in there, and even then it's hard to notice sometimes (Rain Song comes to mind). Having a guitarist tour previously in a non-christian rock band certainly helps with the sound. Unfortunately, they recently went on hiatus.
• During the 1990s punk resurgence, one of the bigger marquee names was a band called Mx Px. They were on MTV's 120Minutes and everything. What hardly anyone in the secular world knew was that they were a Christian punk band. Yet they managed to fit in just fine in the same genre as Rancid and The Offspring.
• Sixpence None the Richer started as a Christian Rock band before finding mainstream success in the late '90s.
• Barlow Girl. Their single, "I Need You To Love Me," is to date the longest number one hit in CCM radio history.
• In 2000, right smack in the middle of the boy-band craze, Christian teenage girls got Plus One. They zoomed to the top of the CCM charts, and had one or two mainstream hits. It didn't hurt that they fulfilled the number-one boy-band priority, namely, being ridiculously good looking.
• Just because the OC Supertones are overtly Christian, it doesn't mean that they can't have an awesome surfer infused ska music.
• Brian Welch, former guitarist of Korn, left the band when he became a Christian and started a solo career. You can find his records in Christian stores.
• Thousand Foot Krutch is a band that many people don't realize that they are Christan rock. Granted their song style is either rap or metal so not exactly what most people think Christan rock is. They tend to be more subtle than most bands as well.
  • Although their song Look Away specifically mentions Jesus and songs like Breathe You In, Already Home, Falls Apart, Inhuman, and Watching Over Me can easily be thought of as Christian songs.
• 78violet (formerly Aly & AJ) are mainly a mainstream pop duo, but have had success on Christian music charts as well.
• Mercy Me, which wrote crossover hit "I Can Only Imagine" and is still tremendously popular in Christian rock/pop circles.

Theater

• Before many of these examples were the Bible-themed rock musicals of the early seventies, Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell. The albums of music from these shows (and later from the movie versions of each) showed many record executives that there really was a market for Christian Rock/Pop.

Western Animation

• An episode of The Simpsons had the Hair Metal band Quiet Riot become the Christian metal band "Pious Riot".

"Christian rock's just like regular rock; you just replace the word "Jesus" with "baby"."

• • Larry Norman made a similar joke in the early '90s. "I mean, replace 'baby' with 'Jesus'..."
    • Allegedly, Ray Charles once said something similar about the blues and gospel -- one's about God, the other's about women.
  • Played with in another episode when Ned expressed his happiness with scoring tickets to a Christian Rock concert. When he shows the tickets to Homer, we see that they are actually for a Chris Rock concert.

"Well sir, I've never heard a preacher use the MF word so many times!"

• • There's also Ned's love of the Christian AC/DC tribute band AD/BC with their hit song "Kindly Deeds (Done For Free)".
  • Oh this exchange as Reverend Lovejoy reads the church bulletin:

Lovejoy: "This Saturday you'll have a chance to 'party down' in the church basement to the Jesus rock stylings of Testament." Bart: [Dismissively] "Everyone already knows all the best bands are affiliated with Satan."

• • Or when the Sunday service had musical guests in the form of the fictional band Covenant:

"Hey, isn't that the drummer from Satanica?" "You know, I think it is."

• South Park took this concept to the next level. Cartman rewrote songs in this matter, but because he didn't change anything else, most of the songs were about having sex with Jesus.
  • The "having sex with Jesus" nature was likely due to the tendency in some Christian rock to use metaphors that sound very sexually-loaded to some non-fans - e.g. repeatedly saying that one wants to "touch," "feel," or "hold" Jesus.
• In one episode of King of the Hill, Hank tries to get his son interested in Christianity again. He is horrified when Bobby becomes an aficionado of Christian Rock and starts hanging around with a group of "Christian Skaters"; the horror is partly due to their appalling fashion sense and musical taste, but mostly because Hank doesn't want Bobby to treat Christianity just like another youthful fad.

Hank: You're not making Christianity better, you're making rock-and-roll worse!

• In Metalocalypse, Murderface attempts to find what religion is right for him; one of his first attempts takes him to a Christian rock concert, where he tries to groove with the horribly lame music with a pained look on his face.