Christian music is having a moment. In the first half of 2024, it was the fourth fastest-growing music genre, fueled by surprisingly large gains among younger listeners. Millennial and younger listeners represented 39 percent of the genre’s overall audience in 2022, but in 2024, that share is up to 45 percent. All this might come as a surprise, especially as the dominant narratives about Christianity in the West are declensional (deconstruction, dechurching, secularization, post-Christian, etc.), especially among Gen Z. But the upward trend for Christian music is real, and it’s starting to be noticed by the secular press. Billboard magazine recently published a feature article on Christian music’s “heavenly rise,” noting the growth has been especially pronounced on streaming sites like Spotify (where the genre has experienced 60 percent growth globally over the last five years). What should we make of this trend? What factors might explain this seemingly counterintuitive rise of contemporary Christian music (CCM) in a secular age? Here are four initial thoughts. 1. CCM has gotten better. Perhaps the most straightforward explanation for CCM’s growth is that it has just gotten better as a genre. I’ve been around Christian music my whole life (and for the majority of its existence as a subculture), and I’ve seen this quality improvement unfold in real time. Christian music has grown up. It’s not as homogenous, predictable, and cheesy as it once had the reputation of being. Christian music has grown up. It’s not as homogenous, predictable, and cheesy as it once had the reputation of being. Of course, excellent Christian music has always existed. But “indie” Christian artists in the ’80s and ’90s—those with more daring artistic inclinations—didn’t have an easy way to gain a large following, since their music purposefully didn’t fit the mold of what Nashville or Christian radio gatekeepers wanted. But technology has changed the game, giving artists new, organic pipelines (namely social media and streaming platforms) for doing their own thing, in their own way, and still finding large audiences. The Billboard article mentions this dynamic, noting the social media savvy of 2024’s breakout stars Forrest Frank and Josiah Queen, both of whom found success organically on social media before landing on the Billboard charts (and garnering Dove Award nominations for “New Artist of the Year”). Christian music is better quality today in part because it sounds more authentic and organic rather than formulaic and gatekeeper-approved. Artists like Frank and Queen make the music they love, even if it’s outside the box. Other artists like Jon Guerra, Andy Squyres, or Taylor Leonhardt can reach audiences with the sort of Bob Dylan–esque troubadour lyricism that Christian radio would never touch. Listeners like authenticity, and younger listeners have an ever-more-refined radar to detect the hypocrisy that has been sadly endemic in “Christian pop culture.” Less gatekeeping plus more authenticity is a net win for the overall quality of the genre. 2. Christianity’s global growth brings new artists and audiences. Globally accessible streaming platforms make the spreading and sharing of music, and the creative collaboration of artists, much easier for the world’s 2.4 billion Christians. Like Christianity generally, there’s no geographic “center” for Christian music. It’s global, and increasingly so. It’s no surprise that Christian music streaming is surging in nations like Brazil, India, South Africa, Indonesia, and the Philippines. That’s where Christianity is growing. Like Christianity generally, there’s no geographic ‘center’ for Christian music. It’s global, and increasingly so. In addition to providing new markets of listeners, Christianity’s growth globally has produced a new crop of artists whose work brings beautiful diversity and international flavor to the genre. I’ve celebrated many of these artists over the years at The Gospel Coalition: CityAlight and Tenielle Neda (Australia), Jonathan Ogden (U.K.), Claudia Isaki (France), IMRSQD (Namibia), Limoblaze (Nigeria), Darla Baltazar (Philippines), and many more. Christian music has existed in different countries around the world for a long time, but the streaming era affords new opportunities for exposure and cross-pollination globally. “CCM” the official industry might still be concentrated in Nashville, but Christian music as a genre exists—and thrives—far beyond America’s Bible belt. 3. Christian music encompasses a diverse array of sounds. Part of what makes Christian music unique as a genre is that it doesn’t have one “sound” but rather can draw inspiration from almost every existing music genre—from folk to Afrobeats to techno to metal and more. Like Christianity itself, Christian music is transcultural and finds expression in limitless ways. This dynamic is noted in the Billboard article: “Unlike most genres, CCM/gospel is built around a central message rather than a particular sound, allowing for a greater range of musical styles, including the pop of for King & Country and Frank; Queen’s rustic, singer-songwriter style; Tauren Wells’ pop/R&B vibe; and Lecrae’s rap.” This stylistic diversity means more music lovers can find something to like. If you like lo-fi, there are plenty of options for you. If you’re into country music or hip-hop, Christian artists in those genres abound. The genre diversity makes it fun to create topical playlists like “8 Psalms, 7 Ways,” which includes musical settings of biblical psalms in a dizzying array of styles, from choral to Celtic to cowboy folk. Christian music is eclectic and full of surprises. This is a strength in the playlist-centric contemporary music environment. Christian music’s stylistic diversity means more music lovers can find something to like. Another part of Christian music’s diversity—and growth—is captured in a distinction Lecrae makes between music made “from the church for the church” and music “from the church to the world.” Music in the latter category is often less explicitly Christian but comes from artists (like Tori Kelly, Surfaces, or Needtobreathe) who don’t hide their faith. This music may reach scores of nonbelievers, improving their perceptions of Christian artistry and leading them to be more open to enjoying explicitly Christian releases by these artists. 4. Listeners are hungry for hope. I suspect another reason Christian music is growing in appeal is that so much of the contemporary music world feels creatively and commercially stagnant. The “meh” climate of pop music—an era when promotion cycles are shorter and would-be tentpole releases are forgotten as quickly as they arrive—opens a door for audience attention to explore elsewhere. So much of pop music generally feels lifeless and uninspired, bogged down by political angst, by tired attempts at transgression, or by the abiding acedia of a decadent culture. Maybe there’s a growing hunger in this culture for less depressing, less navel-gazing music and more hope-filled music anchored in bigger truths. Maybe there’s a growing spiritual curiosity as more and more young people grow weary of the frothy emptiness (heavy on vibes, light on meaning) and diminishing returns of love-yourself anthems of so-called empowerment. Music that’s about nothing but meme-friendly weirdness or vibey aesthetics can only go so far in filling a spiritual void. I think there’s a stirring hunger among young people for music that isn’t just an eternal recurrence of breakup songs set to bubbly ’80s synth or Bon Iver woodsy-folk melancholia. They want substance, hope, purpose, and joy. They want songs that call us to a more interesting and fulfilling place than what goes on within the claustrophobic buffered self. Christian music offers counterprogramming that doesn’t diminish the pain and friction of life but calls us to a higher beauty and perspective. And growing numbers of younger people desire this. Who knows, maybe the expanding popularity of Christian music in the United States is another indicator that the long secular trajectory here might be slowing—or even reversing. Maybe the Christian music upward trend is related to the fact that we’re starting to see the rise of religious “nones” level off. Time will tell. For now, the thriving Christian music scene is worth celebrating. And the good stuff being created by believers around the world is worth sharing.

I don’t know any Christians who say they want less diversity in their church. But when we get more diversity—could be age, ethnicity, class, or something else—it’s often harder to manage than we expect. Suddenly, other people think differently. They don’t understand us. They even make us uncomfortable. And we make them uncomfortable too. It’s not easy to love the ones who drive you crazy. But that’s just what Jamie Dunlop wants us to do in his new book (Crossway/9Marks). He offers eight truths for pursuing unity in your church. Of course, loving the ones who drive you crazy starts with recognizing how God loved us when we were yet sinners. And he didn’t choose us because we were lovely. Rather, he made us so in choosing us before the foundation of the world. It turns out he chose the other people in our churches too. Jamie serves as an associate pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and he joined me on Gospelbound to help us love one another.

Can We All Get Along?

The Regime Media can’t resist injecting their deeply held policy beliefs into certain stories. One of those policy preferences centers around climate, which the media address by performing the condescending ritual of lecturing Republicans on climate after a major disaster. Watch CBS’s Scott MacFarlane lecture former President Donald Trump on climate during his most recent visit to Valdosta, Georgia on occasion of the passage of Hurricane Helene: SCOTT MACFARLANE: We asked him if this historic storm had convinced Trump to consider a new approach on a key issue. Do you think these storms may make you rethink climate change, get more aggressive about climate change? DONALD TRUMP: No. Not too much. The question sticks out towards the end of a basic hurricane roundup, less centered on the catastrophic damage than on the political aspects of the response.  You never see a Regime Media Reporter run behind a prominent Democrat to ask them whether they’ve reconsidered their stance on immigration after a migrant murder. Whether on guns, abortion, climate change or anything else on the leftwing policy platter, the “will you reconsider” questions go in only one direction. If it weren’t for Regime Media, we’d have none at all. Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned report as aired on the CBS Evening News on Monday, September 30th, 2024: NORAH O’DONNELL: Well, tonight President Joe Biden is calling Donald Trump a liar after the former president said the current one isn’t doing enough to help storm victims. Trump visited the storm zone in Georgia today and Biden will be in North Carolina on Wednesday. CBS’s Scott MacFarlane is on the ground in Valdosta, Georgia, with more on the federal response and how this storm is affecting the presidential campaign. SCOTT MACFARLANE: Helene's path of destruction has forced the presidential candidates to change course. Vice President Kamala Harris returned this afternoon from a stop in Nevada for a briefing at FEMA headquarters in Washington, and spoke to both North Carolina and Georgia's governors. KAMALA  HARRIS: We will continue to do everything we can to help you recover and to help you rebuild. No matter how long it takes. MACFARLANE: As a subdued Donald Trump visited a ravaged city in a battleground state. Valdosta, Georgia, where the power is still out, schools are closed and roofs, trees, and signs litter the streets. TRUMP:  Helene turned out to be a big one, like- just about the biggest that anyone’s seen… MACFARLANE: Trump falsely claimed Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp, couldn’t reach President Biden by phone- even though Kemp and the White House spoke this weekend. REPORTER: Donald Trump has accused both of you of ignoring… JOE BIDEN: The guy is lying. Let me get this straight. He is lying. And the governor told him he was lying. MACFARLANE: And Trump suggested Elon Musk provide satellite service to restore wi-fi, even though FEMA is already doing so. We asked him if this historic storm had convinced Trump to consider a new approach on a key issue. Do you think these storms may make you rethink climate change, get more aggressive about climate change? TRUMP: No. Not too much. MACFARLANE: Just down the street from Trump’s location, downtown is shuttered. With generator power, Candy Baumer’s restaurant is serving meals for those who need them, streetside. CANDY BAUMER: Our focus is on our community, not any celebrity or politician that comes in. MACFARLANE: Meanwhile, President Biden said he was commanding direct federal response. First from his home in Delaware, then back at The White House this weekend. BIDEN: My first responsibility is to get all the help needed to those impacted areas. MACFARLANE: With absentee ballots already being distributed, there's another recovery issue to our north in North Carolina, where CBS News has learned the State Board of Elections had an emergency meeting about the damage and said they will have a successful election, no matter the damage. Norah. O’DONNELL: Scott MacFarlane, thank you for being there.  

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Politics Dawn of the Dead? The Democratic Party could stand more influence from the deceased, not less. Drowned out by the uproar over the consumption of dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, was what Republican operatives had hoped would prove a far bigger scandal. This was the shocking news that Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), a Democrat who of course represents the native-born residents of Springfield, had accepted not one, but two donations to his re-election campaign from a woman who, five months before the donations were made, had already died. The donations totaled an appalling $350. Brown has a narrow lead over his GOP challenger, Bernie Moreno, and Ohio’s secretary of state, also a Republican, has referred these alarming facts to the Federal Election Commission. And that, despite the best efforts of the New York Post, which reported the scandal, is about the last anyone has heard of it. While Moreno’s campaign has called the matter “creepy,” his campaign flak, Reagan McCarthy, upped the ante in comments to the Post: “Brown’s scheme to fund his campaign with contributions from dead people isn’t just creepy, it’s illegal.” That Brown is still a free man, not even required to hobble about wearing an ankle bracelet, must come as a disappointment to many conservative Republicans. As a RINO myself, however, I suspect that they might be uncharacteristically shortsighted in their view of the situation. The country would be in far better shape, it seems to me, if more dead Democrats were influencing our elections, not fewer.  And rather than explain away the contributions—if they are called on to do so—Democrats might well defend them proudly. It’s the party of Biden, Harris and Walz, after all, who in their devotion to “our democracy” are forever pushing to expand the franchise, not shrink it, and include groups hitherto shut out of the system. It’s no great surprise that Moreno’s conservative supporters feel the way they do about continuing to restrict the franchise to the undead, but this is misguided on their part. G.K. Chesterton, after all, reminds us that tradition refuses “to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”  That’s only one reason—and a rather abstract one, at that—for viewing the whole matter in a different light. There are other considerations, too. In many ways, the Democrats of the 1960s and 1970s—those who came of age protesting the Vietnam war—are far preferable to today’s tedious crop of self-serving establishmentarians who make up the party’s ruling gerontocracy.  There was a time, not so long ago, that self-described liberal Democrats talked freely and with utter disgust of the national security state, the military–industrial complex, the imperial presidency, and C. Whight Mills’s “Power Elite.” Back then, they claimed to oppose what would later be called the Deep State, though now they have emerged as its greatest defenders. Some of them who, in their college dorms, cheered on the October 1967 March on the Pentagon might take a far dimmer view of any such “insurrection” today. These earlier Democrats were also far less mule-headed on so-called “social issues” than are today’s exuberantly woke crowd. Too many survivors from those days have moved to the left, of course, and far faster than the American people they presume to represent. It was Joe Biden who, as a freshman Senator, called homosexuals “security risks” and supported the Defense of Marriage Act. Hillary Clinton called marriage “not just a bond but a sacred bond between a man and a woman,” and it was her husband who said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.” Most Democrats who held such unenlightened views have long since died, leaving a lot of Americans feeling abandoned as the “deplorables” they are believed to be. We would be remiss, of course, to reduce this lofty concern to personalities and personal hypocrisies—and to scoring cheap points in hopes of owning the opposition. Too much is at stake. The Moreno campaign suspects that Brown has actively sought the financial support of dead people, and if that is the case, the rest of us might learn how this is done and encourage the practice. Moreno’s press director calls it a “conspiracy [that] deserves more scrutiny. How far does it go?” In my judgment, not nearly far enough.  The post Dawn of the Dead? appeared first on The American Conservative.