Let's Talk about Becky

and her son Todd, and the Christian music industry.

We’re going to go in a slightly different direction this week, but trust me, it will all tie in and make sense in the end. We must talk about Becky and Todd to understand who listen to and support Christian music. They are the driving force behind the industry and are who decides what music you listen to on the radio, saw in the Christian bookstores, and maybe even sung in church. Their choices have shaped the landscape of Christian music and thus have shaped the emotions that are allowed in worship services. So, without further ado, let’s talk about Becky and Todd.

Becky

Let’s talk about Becky. She’s a friend or acquaintance of yours, and she’s quite famous and influential in the world of Christian music. She’s been guiding the Christian music industry for over 20 years, but her role has been fading for a while. Some people have written her off, but she still is sticking around, and her opinions on music are still quite relevant, even if her role has shifted. Becky is in her early to mid-fifties now, but she got her start when she was in her late twenties or early thirties. You know her from church or from your kids’ school. She’s the one that is always driving her kids around in her mini-van with the radio tuned to the local family-friendly Christian radio station. Whenever she’s out and about, or even at home, Christian music is the soundtrack of her life.

She got her start in the industry when she visited the local Christian bookstore and bought her first Contemporary Christian album. Her collection of tapes and CDs is all CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) records, and she steers clear of any album that might possibly not be pious or Godly enough for her to listen to. She supports her somewhat conservative beliefs with her wallet and judges the music by the album cover, the lyrics, and what the liner notes say. She’s looking for a certain amount of Jesus’ per Minute (JPM) to be present in the music and the album cover to be modest and non-offensive. If it has enough JPM’s, and can find nothing offensive in or on the album, she buys it. When it crosses the line, she does not buy it, and possibly gossips about the album to her friends. You might have heard her say something like, “Can you believe that Amy Grant or Jaci Valesquez had two buttons undone on her shirt when she posed for the album cover?” Or, I really want to buy the new Amy Grant album, but the lyrics sound more like a love song then a Christian song. She might also say that she can no longer buy a Sandi Patti album because Sandi got divorced. These are actual complaints.

Becky’s Son, Todd

Becky has a son named Todd. He has endured many hours in the backseat of his mom’s minivan, listening to artists like Michael W. Smith, Geoff Moore and the Distance, or Steven Curtis Chapman, with a sprinkle of Avalon and Point of Grace on top. His mom’s music has provided the musical backing to his life, but when he went off to middle school or high school, he broke out of the musical tastes of his mom. He started, in the 90’s, listening to Petra, Whiteheart, DeGarmo and Key, or other Christian rock groups. These were fine for the most part, but his mom did not find the appeal of the guitar driven rock and thought that at least Todd was still listening to Christian music. She consoled herself with the fact that Petra put out a few praise albums, but didn’t understand why they had to ruin the songs with the loud guitars and drums. Becky, being a good mother, still kept an eye and ear on what Todd was listening to.

Becky drew the line when Todd picked up an album that featured men with long hair dressed in yellow and black spandex on the cover. She thought to herself, how did this filth get into the Christian bookstore? That of course, made Todd want to listen to Stryper more. When Todd started to listen to Bloodgood and Whitecross, Becky would have nothing of it. She refused to buy those albums for her son, but Todd would save up and buy the albums, hiding them from his mother’s watchful gaze. When he would get caught listening to them, he’d try to explain to his mom that they were Christian, but Becky did not think a good Christian could sound like that and still love Jesus.

Perhaps Todd took that criticism and went further into the rock and metal that Christian artists were producing, and started listening to Tourniquet, Vengeance Rising, Deliverance (thrash metal), Mortification, Crimson Thorn, Extol, Living Sacrifice (death metal), or somehow found Horde and Antestor (black metal). These bands were all devoted Christians, writing songs about their faith, but used the popular musical genres of the extreme music scene in the 90’s. Or it's possible that Todd started listening to Christian punk and ska like Five Iron Frenzy and MxPx. Todd was trying to rebel, but stay inside of the Christian music family that he had grown up in. The JPM’s had gone down, and the wall of noise had gone up, but it was still about God.

Sound familiar?

These two people, Becky and Todd, are fictional but are based on real people. Leah Payne, in her recent book, God Gave Rock&Roll to You, writes about both. They are both personas made up by the Christian music industry. Becky “was a data-driven composite sketch of the typical buyer of CCM.” Becky is “a suburban, middle-to-upper-class straight white woman who raised he kids with the help of Contemporary Christian Music.” (130) The industry tracked her and knew “what Becky drove, where she lived, her martial status, the size of her household, where she went on a special night out for dinner, and what she ordered at the drive thru.” (130) They knew all that information because they meticulously tracked the spending habits of their chief consumers, their habits, and how they thought about the world. And from that data, they would promote artists that fit how the Becky’s of the world thought about their faith.

The Becky’s of the world kept CCM afloat and CCM kept supplying Becky with music to listen to. As Becky aged, CCM tried to keep up. But Becky’s influence was left behind with the invention of the Internet and music sharing sites. Becky’s money no longer financed the industry, and the major record companies no longer could control what Christian music was out in the world. Or at least fully. The CCM musicians followed the trends and noticed that Becky was listening to more and more worship artists like Delirious?, Chris Tomlin, and more recently Shane and Shane. So, the industry started to push those names and get more involved in producing albums that were full of worship music. You probably noticed that shift if you are old enough when the WoW cd sets started to include WoW Worship albums or Michael W. Smith came out with his Worship album in 2001.

Musicologist Anna Nekola writes that, “By 2004–2005, many album reviews, especially those of the more alternative subgenre ‘modern worship’ don’t mention corporate worship at all, often focusing instead on the music as a personal expression by its creator and the product as intended for listening and not reproduction in a group setting.”[1] Worship was increasingly becoming a personal, solitary practice. Worship became something you could do whenever and wherever you found yourself. In the promotion of worship albums, that ability was highlighted. “Worship music advertisements increasingly promise not just good music but personal intimacy and the transformation of everyday spaces and routines, of personal identity and of worship practice.”[2] Nekola describes an advertisement from Marantha! Music showcasing the interior of a luxury vehicle with the tags “Welcome to the new sanctuary” and “Praise. Worship .Peace. Refuge. Safety. Encouragement. Anywhere.” Nekola comments that the message here is that “listeners should load worship music CDs into their stereos to transform their mundane automobiles into sacred sanctuaries, and their ordinary commutes into spirit-filled worship experiences.”[3] Profane spaces were getting changed into sacred spaces, and it was not just the car that was becoming a church. Nekola quotes Biola University professor and congregational worship director, Barry Liesch,” who “wrote in 1996 that he hoped weekly corporate worship would be a model for private worship so that ‘when caught in a traffic jam or washing the dishes, we might be more inclined to shut off the radio and worship before the Lord alone or with a worship cassette’.”[4] The kitchen, laundry room, and every other room in your house could become a church. The idea is that you no longer must go to church to worship, because everywhere now is a place where you can worship.

By purchasing these albums, Becky furthered the experience of private worship when she slipped on her headphones. She could now walk around while listening to worship music rather than the sounds of her neighborhood. The ads coming out showing the marketing department’s take on spiritual transformation and worship practices reflect and reinforce shifting attitudes towards worship in the US. The intimate experience of listening to music via headphones blurs the line between the listener and the music, enabling listeners to alter their environment with chosen sounds, thus creating a personalized auditory space. Oddly, headphones can also give listeners a sense of collective identity, influencing how they perceive their own subjectivity, even when alone. Advertisements suggest that these products can transform solitary media consumption into corporate worship with an imagined community of Christians. Additionally, these advertisements often claim that the music will bring listeners into the holy presence of God.

Becky followed the marketing while driving the desire to have portable worship that could fill her life with worship music. She bought the worship albums to the point that almost all Christian music is now Worship music. She also has subscribed to the worship YouTube and Spotify channels, driving those algorithms to connect Christian music to Christian Praise and Worship music. On those playlists, worship music mingles and is shuffled in with regular Christian songs and secular songs. As Becky engaged in listening to more worship than other Christian music, worship music has taken over the CCM scene.

Todd has a similar background. Todd was a composite of the Christian metal and punk scenes (130). In the 1990’s, Pastor Bob Beeman started Intense Records, as part of Sanctuary International ministries, (https://sanctuaryinternational.com/pb/) and signed as well as brought together Christian metal acts such as Deliverance, Tourniquet, Angelica, Vengeance Rising, Ken Tamplin, and Saviour Machine. Pastor Bob, as he is still known, was trying to reach the Todd’s of the world, who were branching out from the musical tastes of their moms while remaining firmly in the Christian faith. Frontline Records took over the mantle for producing such bands for a while, and Tooth and Nail Records rose to prominence in the same space with bands such as MxPx, The O.C. Supertones, Zao, Norma Jean, and Underoath. The label for more extreme bands, Solid State, started as an imprint of Tooth and Nail and had bands such as The Devil Wears Prada, Haste the Day, Extol, August Burns Red, Demon Hunter, and Living Sacrifice. These record labels were all supported by Todd and produced many of Todd’s favorite albums.

Just like Becky’s CCM, the internet changed the way these labels operated. Music streaming and sharing sites started to take power away from the major labels. Also, Becky tried to keep these labels and artists out of her precious Christian bookstores because they did not sound or look Christian enough. Nowadays, there are countless Christian rock, punk and metal bands gaining fame on the internet. The same can be said for Christian hip-hop and rap, as they never really had an in-road with the Christian bookstores thanks to Becky and the prevailing vision of what Christian music sounded like. The Christian Music industry is still going strong, but things were changing.

In 2002, the industry published that “84 percent of CCM buyers were white, 60 percent were women, 70 percent were married, 67 percent were “homemakers” and 80 percent owned homes. Beckys were still funding the industry.” (156) However in 2017, most Christian bookstores were closing and “CCM was without its most visible gatekeepers” (156), their army of Beckys. The ability for independent artists to be heard opened the floodgates of Christian music, allowing for more diversity than what the labels or radio stations were able to control.

What does this have to do with Emotional Formation?

The history of CCM is quite interesting, and I suggest that you read Leah Payne’s very accessible and well researched book on the topic, Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong’s A History of Praise and Worship if you are interested in how Christian music has changed in the last few decades. Both books walk their readers through the history and understandings of what Christian music is. By understanding the history, we can understand how emotional formation occurs and what emotions become allowed in Christian music. As we look at the last 50 years of Christian music, we start to understand how emotions were allowed and disallowed.

The Beckys of the world were looking for family-friendly positive music that were about Jesus and how Jesus helped them get through the world. If we look at the slogans of Christian radio stations, we start to see that family-friendly and positive becomes the norm for Christian music. Becky wanted music that made them feel good even if things were going wrong in their life and the world. Because that is what the market demanded, the music that became popular and marketed was positive and uplifting. Even the metal and punk Christian scene continued the trend of being positive and uplifting, even though their music became darker and louder.

There is almost a self-fulfilling prophesy as Becky and Todd were getting told that they wanted music that was uplifting, encouraging, positive, joyful, and would make them happy. They bought the music, telling the labels that they wanted music with that emotional content. They brought God with them wherever they went, and Christian music became background music. Some were actively listening, or at points actively listen, but often it was just on. The marketing department said that it would elevate every space and make it into church, but sometimes how the music was engaged with made the church worse. Some people now expect the worship of the church to sound just like the album and elicit the same feelings, causing people to be disappointed with church worship. Others bring in the mindset that worship is something that they do alone as they have gotten used to listening that way.

The emotions, along with the music, were kept to joy and praise by both Becky and Todd. They wanted music that sounded like what they had heard on the secular radio stations, or the albums friends were playing, but they wanted them to be safe for Christians and confirm their faith. Both Becky and Todd, and the scenes that they supported, propagated joy and praise by what they produced and what they bought.

Conclusion

I hope you’ve enjoyed a little peak behind the curtain of how things work in Christian music publishing and trends. Becky and Todd might no longer have the concentrated power that they used to have, but we see the aftereffects still. If you look at the charts, there are a lot of familiar names showing up but there are also some newcomers popping up. Looking at the top streaming Christian Contemporary songs, as put on a playlist by Spotify, Steven Curtis Chapman, Michael W. Smith, Mac Powell (from Third Day), TobyMac, MercyMe, Newsboys, and Chris Tomlin all show up and would have been listened to on the radio by Becky. Yet, there are names on the list that I do not recognize as well as some artists that are up and coming or the new stalwarts.

Most of the songs are praise and worship or adjacent. These songs are worship, praise, or adoration focused, bringing the church into the headphones or car, still creating moments of private worship. By having these songs forming the soundtrack of the listeners lives reinforces how they are to worship God and brings expectations into the church.

Confession

I’m a bit of a Todd.

Adjacent Podcasts:

I’ve been listening to two wonderful podcasts that do not directly relate but are relatable.

The first one is The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by Mike Cosper and Christianity Today. Here’s their description: They say the Devil’s in the details, but when conspiracies captivate our imaginations, we often overlook the real devils walking among us.

From the creators of the hit podcast The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill comes a new show, Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, which takes you back to the Satanic Panic that gripped America in the 1980s and 90s.

This limited series explores how hysteria gripped parents and teens through cautionary tales like Go Ask Alice, influenced notorious criminal cases like the West Memphis Three, and catapulted the political agenda of the Moral Majority.

Join as we seek to understand how this wave of panic devastated innocent lives and diverted the church’s attention from the evil lurking in its own pews.

Content warning: It does talk about abuse and in some detail. It might not be appropriate for all listeners.

I think it’s related because growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, I heard all sorts of things about the dangers of rock&roll and warnings to stay away from the work of the Devil, while also being oblivious to what abuses were going on in the church.

The second podcast I’m listening to that is relatable is In The Church Library created and hosted by Kelsey Kramer McGinnis and Marissa Franks Burt. Here’s their description: Join Kelsey Kramer McGinnis and Marissa Franks Burt for conversation around popular Christian resources found in church libraries. The first season focuses on parenting books Kelsey and Marissa read as they wrote their forthcoming book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.

I think it’s related because it talks frankly about how Christians tried their best to raise good Christian children but may have done harm to the kids by following the parenting books. Again, it’s showing that just because its sold as Christian does not mean that it is good to use or follow.

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[1] Anna Nekola, “'I'll Take You There': The Promise of Transformation in the Marketing of Worship Media,” in Christian Congregational Music: Performance, Identity and Experience, ed. Monique M. Ingalls, Carolyn Landau, and Tom Wagner (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 125.

[2] Nekola, “‘I'll Take You There.’”

[3] Nekola, “‘I'll Take You There.’”, 127.

[4] Nekola, “‘I'll Take You There.’”, 127.