The aim of this chapter is to explore subtle but nevertheless weighty shifts in power and influence that are by-products of the commoditization of worship music and may be impacting both the tone of charismatic worship and perceptions of what musical worship is and should be. Central to this discussion is the idea that culture industry,1 with its power to manufacture demand for its products and to elevate particular models of musical expression over others through promotion and marketing, has a homogenizing or flattening effect on a music culture that was born in spontaneity and with a diversity of approaches.
The mid-1980s was a heady time in Nashville, Tennessee, for anyone who worshipped in a charismatic congregation and was also involved with the contemporary Christian music (CCM) industry.2 At Nashville’s Belmont Church, an air of expectancy was particularly present. By 1985, Belmont was well on its way to completing a remarkable metamorphosis from a Church of Christ congregation that eschewed instrumental music into a thoroughgoing Spirit-filled, charismatic congregation that provided a spiritual and musical home to a number of key CCM artists, including Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith. Belmont had been my church home since 1976, and I shared the congregation’s developing sense of destiny, the feeling that we were flowing with the sea change in Christian worship arts that was taking place in England, California, and elsewhere. We believed that Belmont had a role to play in the charismatic revival that would renew Christian thought and practice around the world.
It was clear to many of us that Belmont’s contribution to the renaissance in worship arts and to what we thought of then as the redemption of popular culture would, in significant part, come through the music makers and Christian music industry leaders nurtured at Belmont. Not only was I a member of the Belmont congregation during this period, but it was then that my professional activities shifted away from the world of mainstream popular music toward the energized and emerging CCM scene. I am sure that Belmont’s valorization of its Christian music artists had an effect on my thinking. Belmont’s influence aside, however, the idea that there was a context in which I could make music with a high level of pop authenticity, but which would also allow me to include reflections on my spiritual life, was an enticement. And, as a more material lure, sales numbers for CCM seemed to confirm that the efforts to make a place in the popular arts for Christian sensibilities were succeeding. CCM artists such as Amy Grant were beginning to break into the worlds of pop music radio and press, albeit with a sort of grudging critical acceptance. The idea that Christian music would find success in the marketplace of pop culture was important to our Nashville community. It was also important to many other evangelical-minded Christians at that time who were exploring ways of dealing with the bifurcation of identity between spiritual and cultural citizenship through purposeful cultural activism.
From its start, my experience with CCM was a theological and cultural minefield. I struggled with how to connect my interpretation of Jesus’s words regarding money with the commodification of faith as I was encountering it in the CCM industry. Almost simultaneous with my earliest involvement in CCM, I found myself participating in a recurring conversation among artists and individuals in the industry about whether Christian music artists should see their endeavors through the lens of business or ministry. Some of us struggled with the question more than others. For us, the worlds of moneymaking and spiritual devotion were like opposing magnetic poles. Unlike some of our friends and associates in the CCM industry, we were unable to make the poles mutually attractive. The “elephant in the room”—the shaping of faith, testimony, and ritual for commercial return—was a nearly constant, although often unspoken, presence in conversations and meetings. I grappled with a disquieting sense that something was at stake—at least for me. That disquiet became more profound as praise and worship (P&W), the music that had recently redefined my own worship life, became the industry’s focus.
One aspect of my struggle—one that continues to complicate my attempts to understand Christian culture industry—was the difficulty of separating the people involved from the activities and effects of industry. Several close friends and others whom I esteem help make the world of Christian products and celebrity go around. I struggle with how to problematize the effects of the industry on churches and individuals, as I will do here, while knowing many of the people involved to be good, caring, and well intentioned. I carry that tension into this discussion.
It is to my benefit in this matter, however, that the fragmentation of the music industry as a result of digital technology and the Internet has opened up a sight line through which we can find perspective on where the real power governing the production and consumption of cultural goods lies. It is not solely in the will of individuals and companies but in a will that human beings have set loose in the cultural machinery—one that, as described by cultural theorists including Baudrillard (1994), Debord (1994), and Barthes (1977), now has a self-sustaining logic that seems natural to us. In that light, this chapter is not a critique of the Christian music industry except to the extent to which it molds itself or is molded by those culture-shaping forces that run through all culture industries and media and have become taken for granted in the culture of consumption.
It may be the case that the most significant product of culture industry is the lens through which we view the cultural landscape. The self-sustaining ways and means of the culture industry are to a large extent now invisible to us. They are woven into the fabric of everyday life. Through electronic media and mass communications, we daily come under the influence of ideologically charged cultural powers (Hardt 2004, 133–39; Adorno 2000). We have come to see the ubiquity of culture industry as natural. Many of the old cultural divides, such as between religion and pop culture, are, for better or worse, ruptured. We are, therefore, not surprised when we see (if we do) culture industry at work in our activities of worship. The already blurred line between sanctuary and marketplace is growing increasingly indistinct in subtle increments.
My interest in the ways in which religion and business accommodate each other for the accomplishment of their individual goals sharpened in 2001. It came unexpectedly with the experience of seeing Shout to the Lord, volume 1 of Songs 4 Worship—the first Time Life compilation of worship songs—advertised on cable television. I was taken aback by this ad. Missing in my reaction was the celebration anticipated in the CCM era, with its hope that one day we would see evangelical Christian cultural artifacts get equal time and evenhanded treatment in electronic media. Several months after the launch of the Time Life advertising campaign, a record label marketing person described it to me as a great success on business and spiritual levels.3 The ad did not register with me as a win, however. My impression was that this was an occasion in which competing for attention in commodity culture had exacted a price that was not reducible to money. For me, the images of congregations with eyes closed, hands raised, and rapt expressions were sullied, as the sights and sounds of devoted worship in these ads were sandwiched between less noble images used to sell everything from car insurance to lingerie.
In hindsight, I know that my reaction to the Time Life ads was layered with complexities. At play was my internal conflict over the commoditization of faith. Again, it seemed to me that there was something at stake. Perhaps my experiences working within the culture industry had sensitized me to the whims of the marketplace and the ephemeral nature of its trends and products. Perhaps I was feeling protective of the important concepts on which Christian products are based—afraid that somehow those ideas would suffer by the falling out of fashion that is the fate of most pop culture products. I suspect that the most powerful dynamic at work was my affection for the new music of worship. Singing the new songs with fellow worshippers was powerful. It constituted a healing sonic experience that was, on the one hand, familiar and contiguous to my life outside the church and, on the other hand, a remove from the ever-present, unwanted noise of that life.
Over time, my questions regarding the industrialization of worship music became an academic interest. It was then that I turned to friends and associates at Belmont and beyond with whom I shared worship and music industry life to seek their observations and opinions on the commoditization of worship and its possible outcomes.
In numerous conversations and interviews with individuals who are or were active both in worship leadership and in the culture industry, I heard viewpoints on the worship music industry at every point on the scale between enthusiastic support and vitriolic disparagement.4 Where my conversation partners questioned the industrialization5 of musical worship, there was often a point of friction between belief and business. They exhibited a split loyalty, a contested allegiance to two ideas: first, that certain areas of spiritual life should not be subjected unshielded to the whims of popular culture, and, second, that the industry can serve consumers in multiple ways, such as through the provision of a portable worship experience in the form of CDs and DVDs.
Most of my conversation partners have learned to live with their feelings of friction. A strong sense of calling attenuates the perceived downsides of commoditizing worship music and experience. Yet aspects of the industry that seem negative but elude easy appraisal continue to trouble them. As one conversation partner, a worship music writer and performer said, “It’s my job and I love it. But, as a Christian, I have to say that there is something askew there.”6 To these individuals’ credit, a mission of facilitating true worship maintains a secure place in their motivations and self-understanding as professional worship music makers. However, some of them are also savvy observers and analysts of cultural and religious phenomena.
As an executive at EMI Christian Records, Lynn Nichols was instrumental in giving worship music its current commercial weight. When Nichols went to work for EMI in the early 1990s, “Christian entertainment music,” as he refers to CCM, was faltering in its market share. One musical trend was coming to a close; another was being kindled in local churches. Having a long personal history in charismatic worship, Nichols responded with enthusiasm when he witnessed the modern rock worship band Delirious? performing at a youth event in England. What he found in England was a band and a worship music scene that espoused purposes that aligned with his own desire to produce cutting-edge music for contemporary worshippers. Nichols was one of the people who shaped the sound, the look, and ultimately public perceptions of P&W. He was also a consumer, someone looking for music that would inspire and lift his own worship experiences.
Nichols’s religious and musical sensibilities were shaped in and by the Jesus Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was there, he says, that he experienced “the move of the Spirit that spawned many unconventional churches and birthed a new music.” As a young musician and a young Christian, Nichols was enthralled by the free and unpredictable musical worship he encountered in a New York charismatic community. He loved the songs. They were, to him, “now” and “relevant to the times and culture—unshackled from the stoic hymns of the past.” “Eventually,” Nichols explains, “the few Christian music companies that existed at that time seized this new marketing opportunity to sell to the youth market and the newly converted hippies.” This was, as Nichols now sees it, the beginning of a process of commercialization wherein a musical experience that was once “fresh, honest, and inspired became stale.”
Arguing from the viewpoint of a professional music producer, Nichols says that the culture industry’s propensity to standardize products has a homogenizing effect.
NICHOLS: I think what [bothers] me most is that the music is turning into a very contrived, very derivative, very copycat kind of sound. So, there’s not much freedom. It’s become very restricted in how it’s composed, how it’s presented, how it’s supposed to sound. This is largely for commercial reasons. I understand [why] because I’ve been in the commercial music business. But that doesn’t make me like it. I don’t like it in the pop music business either.
According to Nichols, recordings are sounding more and more alike, and the churches that use the songs are beginning to look and sound more and more alike. Homogenization, he suggests, is present at the point of consumption as well as the point of production—in the songwriting, the recording aesthetics, and, consequently, the performance of the songs at the local level. Whereas P&W was born in churches with independent spirits, each with its own nuanced ways of doing musical worship, there is now an “industry standard” by which many churches measure their worship arts.
NICHOLS: You program these [worship songs] on radio, and get them to top ten or number one positions, and a lot of Christian people drive around and listen to Christian radio because, to them, it’s a positive reinforcement. They’re not necessarily listening to it to hear the coolest new song or to find out where music is going. They want support in their beliefs. Most of these radio stations see themselves as purveyors of [that]: “We’re feeding people, encouraging people, nourishing people, creating a safe family place.” [However], what you start doing—and it’s much like the film industry—you start telling people what is good and what they need.
PERKINS: The industry tells them?
NICHOLS: The industry does. You know, it happens in films. In both industries, you have people telling you what you need to have. That [happens] on pop radio. And that same equation moves over to Christian radio. After a while [people say], “Yeah, this is good.” Repetition—which is going to motivate the purchase—has an effect. Those people begin to think, “This is what worship music is. This is what it sounds like.” And then they go to church, and almost every church that’s a bigger church and that is evangelical is going to have a fairly competent worship band and they are singing these songs—just like they are heard on the CDs. The arrangements are going to be the same. You hear those songs and a lot of songs like them. The way this is impacting Christian culture is that [consumers] now embrace this as “This is worship.” [This phenomenon] is not unique. The commercial market does this too. TV does. Magazines tell you when you open the page, “You have to look like this.” It’s the same selling methods really. There is no difference. So, they [industry] are creating their own Christian pop culture.
Speaking with Nichols, I get the impression that the most precious thing about his early charismatic experiences was his sense that the Holy Spirit was immediately present as an animating force within the congregation’s performance of music. Nichols confides that this quality of worship is becoming harder for him to find. He sees this missing quality of worship as a casualty of the commoditization of the music. The homogenizing effects of industrialization have promoted predictability and compromised, for him, a clear sense of the leading of the Holy Spirit. It may be that Nichols knows too much about how songs and recordings are crafted to produce desired emotional responses. Nevertheless, the kind of spontaneity he finds becoming scarce is a deeply felt issue for him. Nichols reflects on how the industry is altering the qualities of P&W that attracted him early on:
NICHOLS: Another observation on worship bands generally—and I know there are exceptions—but, for the most part, it is a preprogrammed idea of worship. So, often there is no leeway to expound or let the Holy Spirit lead you. Now, not in every case, but more and more it’s become...
PERKINS: It’s a set liturgy?
NICHOLS: That’s right. It’s set. There’s a set list! [laughs] Now, I’m not saying that people don’t stray from it. But, for the most part, it is set. And, in a lot of churches, it’s also the [radio or CCLI7] hit list. And it’s a cover band, because you’re covering [popular] worship songs.
Here, Nichols speaks from the perspective of a music maker. In addition to his other capabilities, he is an excellent guitarist with considerable experience as an improvisational player. He has come to see improvisational music making and charismatic worship in the same light. Nichols believes that whether an individual musician, band, or congregation is performing music, it is the Holy Spirit’s active leadership that makes of the performance a transcendent experience. Hence, he complains that there is a lost opportunity when a worship band performs a well-known song exactly like the recorded version. By not making room for the Spirit’s creative input in their individual and group performance, the performers miss an opportunity to participate in and experience inspired worship.
I asked Nichols whether it is enough that written into the arrangement of many worship songs is an opening for Spirit-led inspiration—where, in a sense, a place has been set at the musical table by the songwriter and record producer for the Holy Spirit.
PERKINS: There seems to be a linear quality to the arrangement and construction of worship songs, which allows for spatial shifts in the song to accommodate spoken or other sung things. In that sense, there is room in the songs [for spontaneity]. But you’re saying that in the service itself there is no room?
NICHOLS: Well, there tends not to be. In my church, on occasion, there will be something where the song kind of ends or breaks down, and somebody is strumming something and somebody might talk... or, read a Scripture, or say something that’s on their heart. But the thing that I noticed with some of these real worship leaders and worship writers when I went to England and, also, when I was part of a church in upstate New York in the ’70s, there was an awful lot of spontaneity, which was really great! What I notice with my Delirious? friends and a lot of these English guys is when they’re up there leading worship, it’s much more likely to take a U-turn musically. It wasn’t on that level. It was... venturing out into something where we don’t know where we’re going. We’re following our nose, our antenna.
What Nichols saw in the Jesus Movement and again in England in the early 1990s was a scene unaffected by the conditions that, in Nichols’s purview, now drive, shape, and restrict the sound and functional possibilities of worship music. Registering his belief that spontaneity was becoming more rare in charismatic worship, Nichols described these early worship scenes:
NICHOLS: Almost always, [the songs spontaneously] went someplace else. And that whole movement was about that. They would sing a song and maybe jump off here and do another thing. But, in order to make the music commercial, palatable, you have to get it down to a certain time—which is understandable if you’re going to put it on a CD. Unless it’s a live worship album, you have to edit it down. And if you’re going to get it on the radio, it has to have a formula. So, this [then] goes into the church and makes the worship band be a little less spontaneous, more programmed—a little less open to having the freedom to [say], “We’re going someplace else with this, and the Lord is saying this to us.”
PERKINS: Wasn’t that actually the hook for all of this in the beginning?
NICHOLS: Exactly right! That was what people were responding to—that God was on the move and you could feel it. Because people who feel that anointing, feel God moving, are touched and move into a different place. Maybe it opens up something for them and speaks to them in a different way. I feel like a lot of that is being limited by the commercialization factor. Because it was [once] the hook, as you said. That was why people went there. It wasn’t “We’re going to sing three hymns and then we’re done.”
When asked whether spontaneity could be “manufactured,” Nichols responded that many churches include preprogrammed, rather than Spirit-inspired, “spontaneous” moments that are experienced as arising naturally by worshippers who have never “tasted” the real thing.
Nichols then raised the idea that, in the context of worship and perhaps beyond, music is a living metaphor for spiritual life. He sees music as the medium by which worshippers explore the inexhaustible possibilities of interaction with the divine. For Nichols, musical worship is an adventure. Moreover, it is an Abrahamic8 adventure wherein worshippers respond to a call to seek God by moving into unmapped territories—as Nichols says, “to venture out,” to “move into a different place.” Behind Nichols’s remarks is the suggestion that any adventure that proceeds according to a script is no longer truly an adventure and its rewards are diminished. Commercial worship music no longer holds surprises for Nichols. He knows the map. He helped draw it. From his perspective, it is troubling to think that worshippers are unaware or unconcerned that they are following a script. If I hear Nichols and some of my other interviewees correctly, to rediscover the spiritual adventure of musical worship is a necessary mission for worship leaders and congregations.
While radio has suffered since the ascension of the Internet and lost its pride of place in terms of where consumers hear new music, Nichols says that it remains an important influence on how particular kinds of music get produced. Despite the diminishment of radio’s effectiveness in selling music, record companies continue the ingrained practice of standardizing their recordings for radio. Radio playability lives on as a benchmark for establishing when a recording is ready for the marketplace. Playability typically involves sonic refinement, a relatively short playing time, and stylistic conformity to a program’s play list. Nichols suggests that tailoring worship music to radio’s sensibilities contributes to the homogenizing effect.
So, too, does John Styll, a former CEO of the Gospel Music Association. Styll reports that, through extensive market research over time, adult contemporary Christian radio has learned that its target listener is “a woman, age approximately thirty-four, mother of two, and driving an SUV or minivan.”9 This representative listener/buyer is affectionately referred to by the industry as Becky. New worship music coming across the desks of music directors at adult contemporary Christian stations meets a litmus test: Will Becky like it? As it turns out, Becky is favorable to P&W because its content is exclusive—distinctly Christian. She can listen to it with her children present and not just feel safe in terms of what they might hear; she believes that the clear messages in the songs will have a positive, constructive effect on their lives.
Nevertheless, it is likely that Becky grew up listening to the hits of pop radio. There is an expectation on her part as to what sounds good. P&W must please Becky musically—in songwriting, performance, and production—or she will lose interest, despite the Christian lyrics. Becky makes consumer decisions through an inherited set of quality control filters. She expects her Christian songs to sound as pleasing as pop songs. Moreover, Becky may get great satisfaction from participating in a congregational performance of a ten-minute, quasi-improvisational P&W song on Sunday morning, but her attention will not hold for that length of time for a radio song. Hence, Becky is implicated with regard to the mutation of P&W music from the free-form, led-by-the-Spirit experience in the sanctuary described by Nichols and others to the world of the four-minute recording and radio hit. In the quest for radio playability, the Christian culture industry effectively puts Becky’s face on every future worshipper who will experience a particular worship song, which arrives in their sanctuary off the rack and ready-made... for Becky.
One radio programmer10 contends that making P&W viable for radio play is merely a process of distillation, of compressing the salient moments and effectual characteristics of P&W into the much shorter radio format and giving the recording a slicker production for radio playability. Nichols and Styll see the matter from another perspective. They maintain that the processes of industrialization are depreciating the expressive range and spirit of P&W that was and continues to be formative for them. Nichols argues that the adaptation of P&W music to radio standards undercuts the music’s best qualities—the adventurous attributes, spontaneity, and variety of expression that made it attractive to him in the first place.
Culture industry sustains and reproduces itself through a persistent procession of new commodities, material and otherwise. Like other culture industries, the worship industry generates a constant flow of new product. Belmont Church worship leader Rob Frazier11 acknowledges that keeping pace with the quantity of songs promoted to worshippers through the Internet, radio, magazines, and other media is difficult. The quantitative force of new music coming into churches affects what happens on Sunday morning. Frazier says that it is difficult for him, as a worship leader, to consider using even a small portion of the new songs produced regularly by publishers and record labels. Keeping pace with the industry’s output is also difficult for his congregation. Frazier and his Belmont Church associates must make adjustments to maintain continuity in the face of the pressing flow of new songs.
FRAZIER: We are encouraged by the worship department to think in terms of continuity. We’re actually forbidden to bring more than two new songs any given week. And I won’t even do that. One new song is as much as I’ll ever do because it takes a long time for people to learn it. The first time through, people are just staring at you. [We] have to remember that we’re not dealing with a room full of musicians. And we try to make sure to do something, at least one or two songs, from the last week, just to keep a level of continuity. Because people do complain: “Oh man, all these new songs—I can’t learn ’em...!” Here’s something you hear: “I can’t worship with all these new songs.” What they mean is they’re taking time away from their experience of God, as they understand it, to learn a new song—which is hard.
PERKINS: They have to think too much?
FRAZIER: Think too much, right. So, it’s important to do some very familiar songs that people really know.
One explanation for the pressure to keep pace felt by Frazier and other worship leaders is that it is not just songs, styles, and sounds that are being mass imported into worship, but also pop culture’s logic of music consumption. In the general marketplace, an underlying doctrine of disposability makes the continuous procession of music product normative. In worship, however, disposability and manufactured need are dynamics that test how effectively music serves the deepest and oldest intentions of worship. The idea that songs, which have attained sacred status, should be displaced to make way for the latest variations—and at the design of an outside entity or process—can be troubling to invested congregations. The fact that songs can remain on the CCLI chart much longer than do songs on pop charts may indicate that worshipping communities remain interested in a musical canon. Should that be true, the pop culture logic of consumption and the unrelenting flow of new songs may, at some point, cause resistance to the worship industry.
Songwriter and musician Phil Madeira12 suggests that the industrialized flow of new product contributes to a glut of poorly written songs. Just like the pop music industry, the worship industry works to keep consumers interested by creating new variations of its product. In the continual push to increase sales, the industry produces more and more music, which inevitably results in music that lacks imagination and craftsmanship. Several of my conversation partners—fine songwriters themselves—deliver sharp critiques of some worship music. Madeira sees poor songwriting and uninspired performance as an industry by-product, but even more than that, as a stain on the word “Christian.” He pushes back against the powerful marketing machinery that links the foundational concepts of Christianity and Christian identity with popular arts that he considers substandard and, in his opinion, drag the word “Christian” down.
MADEIRA: I am up there playing [for worship]. But why am I there? Sometimes I’m just rolling my eyes at the music.
PERKINS: What makes you roll your eyes?
MADEIRA: Oh, just what I consider as a craftsman to be a bad song. It’s really not my place, in that moment, to be rolling my eyes. But I am. I’m sort of detached. What is interesting to me is the shift—the evangelical scene seems to be, and I’m not sure [“evangelical” is] even the right word... but that group of people that embrace the P&W thing—I mean, it all seems like one big conglomerate package of “This is who a Christian is, this is what a Christian looks like, this is what a Christian eats, this is what he likes, this is what he doesn’t do, this is how he votes.” So, a person like me is eventually going to say, “I don’t actually fit here. I believe so much of what they believe, but, in terms of the outward expression, it’s not working for me.” So, I am going to be naturally critical, for better or worse, of the whole program—of the Christian books, of the Christian music. Why would anyone ever put the word “Christian” in front of this if they wanted it to be meaningful?
Madeira’s observations extend beyond his musical tastes. They reflect his concern that worship itself is being commercialized. For Madeira, narrowing the representational field of who and what qualifies as Christian is one of the ways he sees culture industry shaping perceptions of worship. With that flattening of diversity, the future of the kind of democratized worship and range of approaches that birthed P&W and attracted many of my conversation partners seems, to them, questionable. Nichols contends that most consumers are content with things as they are. He places some responsibility, however, on the music makers themselves to guide the trends of the worship industry.
NICHOLS: We humans tend to gravitate to a form. It’s safe, familiar, and comforting. God, on the other hand, cannot be boxed in, nor can he be contained. By the way, he owns music. He created it. It is up to those of us who have been given the [musical] gift to listen and pay attention to which way the wind blows.
Considering the question of how best to produce an effective ethos of worship, several of my conversation partners made a distinction between the role of culture industry and that of churches, or, said more simply, between the global and local production of worship. Frazier commented on the authority of culture industry’s media powers and how easily it can eclipse the value of locally imagined worship arts. Expressing a desire to see worship music maintain its vitality and elude the fate of all commercial trends—obsolescence—Nichols stresses that churches must explore their own creative resources. One of Belmont’s first worship leaders, Wayne Berry,13 takes the idea a step further by arguing that such an exploration is, itself, an act of worship. To carefully and gratefully see what congregational gifts are lying dormant, to inquire and find what has already been provided, is a foundational practice in the establishment of a congregation’s worship life. In separate conversations, industry-affiliated worship leaders Rick Cua and Stu G shared this perspective:14 the industry has a singular ability to serve and connect individuals and churches worldwide with state-of-the-art expressions of worship, but the local parsing and adaptation of the numerous choices that industry makes available is critically important. For an observer like Nichols, this accentuation of the role of the local is not a product of sentimental attachment to the good old days of contemporary worship but an informed realization that the locus of the music and the movement’s vitality, its hope for the future, are where they have always been—with local worshipping communities and their music makers who create songs in context, songs born out of the worship of real people in unique social-spiritual relationships, songs that immediately represent the devotional and prophetic voice of the community.
Belmont Church and similar churches that developed a strong P&W culture became locations of a significant shift in the relationship between church and culture at large. That change is most clearly expressed in a still-developing partnership between churches and culture industry, wherein churches seek fresh ways to live out the dual citizenships of culture and religion, to build membership and community, to substantiate the relevance of Christian worship to contemporary culture, and to effectively utilize mechanisms of communication for the purpose of spreading the Gospel message. One result is that churches have gone into business with business in a way that connects worship and the cultural marketplace more directly than ever before. While music and religion have long shared space and purpose in the sanctuary, the industrialization of P&W introduces the question of whether the marketplace has joined the intimate relationship between worship and music in a ménages à trois, the unraveling of which, even if desired, may now prove difficult (Perkins 2011, 2, 188).
Of concern in this chapter is the question of how and to what extent culture industry shapes worship music and ultimately the worship activities of the people who use it. Several of my conversation partners observed homogenization, an expanding sameness and loss of expressive diversity, resulting from the standardization of worship music as product. Many of my interviewees asserted that the current industry standard for how worship sounds and looks has, in one way or another, diverged from what initially drew them to charismatic worship and its progressive music culture. As culture makers, these individuals understand that things change. Yet they grapple with shifts that undermine what are, to them, foundational characteristics of the worship they value.
1. My definition of culture industry is similar to that of Horkheimer and Adorno: “the constellation of entertainment businesses that produce film, television, radio, magazines, and popular music—all phenomena created by mass technology in which the lines between art, advertising, and propaganda blur” (Leitch 2001, 1220). I would update this to include all Internet-related content and its cultural effects.
2. For overviews of CCM, see Alfonso (2002), Howard and Streck (1999), and Cusic (2002).
3. See PR Newswire (2001).
4. The interviews featured here are a representative sample from a larger group conducted as fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation at Vanderbilt University (Perkins 2011). For that project, I interviewed, formally and informally, more than one hundred individuals. With the individuals named in this chapter, I revisited and, where necessary, updated those interviews.
5. As it appears here, the term “industrialization” is informed by Adorno’s nuanced explanation: “The expression ‘industry’ is not to be taken literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing itself” (2000, 233).
6. Name withheld by request.
7. Christian Copyright Licensing International.
8. See Genesis 12:1–8.
9. From a special lecture at Vanderbilt University on September 23, 2008.
10. Name withheld by request.
11. Frazier, an award-winning CCM songwriter and recording artist, is now a worship pastor and musician at Belmont.
12. As a session musician, Madeira performed on numerous CCM and P&W recordings. Christian and country music artists have recorded his songs. In 2012, he released a critically acclaimed alternative worship album entitled Mercyland: Hymns for the Rest of Us.
13. Berry leads worship in Smyrna, Tennessee, at Springhouse Worship and Arts Center.
14. Rick Cua was a respected CCM artist with multiple albums released by Refuge, Reunion, and Sparrow Records. As an executive with the EMI Christian publishing team, he played an important role in the success of Worship Together. Cua participated in worship leadership at Belmont Church and is now a worship leader and pastor at Grace Community Church in Leipers Fork, Tennessee. Stu G (Stuart David Garrard) was a founding member of Delirious? He continues to write and produce new worship music as a member of One Sonic Society.
Adorno, Theodor. 1991. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Edited by J. M. Bernstein. London: Routledge.
. 2000. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In The Adorno Reader, edited by Brian O’Connor, 230–38. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
Alfonso, Barry. 2002. The Billboard Guide to Contemporary Christian Music. New York: Billboard Books.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. Edited and translated by Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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