This is a call to the Christian Artists of my generation. The 30 something, millennials, the gen-exers, even the Z's. What are we doing?
I directed a camp of Junior High students this summer and one day, while humming an old DC Talk song, I decided to ask the hip young middle schoolers who the cool new Christian Rock bands were. They didn't answer. Well... one did.
"I don't know, I really only listen to Christian music."
"Yeah, that's what I mean. Who are the cool Christian rock bands, like Skillet and Reliant K."
"I went to the Lauren Deigle concert last year."
One of the other leaders nodded with appreciation, "she IS the Adelle of Christian Music."
"Yeah, but she does praise music." I let the subject drop. Maybe they were just afraid to tell everyone what they thought was cool, in case they were wrong.
But my brain did not let the subject drop. Sitting at work a week later I decided to do some research on the matter. I started by googling things like "Contemporary Christian Music," and "Alternative Christian Rock," and scrolled through the lists. The most recent band listed under Christian Rock was from 2008. That's the year I graduated from high school. When I was in middle school and high school there were tons of Christian bands that I could listen to that weren't the standard praise song bands. Bands with a lot of guitar that asked serious questions about what to do when we stumble in our faith, that focused deeply on biblical truths and social commentary and not just on how we felt about God. There was an honest to the songs that resonated with me as an angsty teenage Christian.
Can it be possible that the vibrant Christian Rock scene that I knew is gone?
I looked deeper into the matter.
The record labels I was familiar with had extremely short lists of signed bands on their Wikipedia pages. Most of the bands I knew were listed as disbanded. Most disturbing, I found a range of articles all with variants of the same title, "Who Killed Christian Contemporary Music?"
Who? Turns out, it was Christians... and the digital age.
You would think that in the digital age, where artists can produce everything themselves in their basement and then put it out for the world to see, that we would have an incredibly vibrant community of artists producing bold music and writers producing new styles of writing and kinds of stories. Instead the gates are growing smaller and the gatekeepers much more dangerous. Instead, the digital age has made information and art and even people's life stories transient and disposable and so what is being produced seems to be shrinking into smaller and smaller bite size categories. Nothing outside of those small slices is accepted by the marketing specialists watching over the gates to real artistdom.
There is no more room to create and potentially fail as artists. Instead the digital age gives us room to create the few small things that we know will last long enough to sell. For Christian music that means praise music. Love songs to God. Something that can be marketed to the churches and sung in sanctuaries every Sunday. And it feels like my generation has just accepted that. We are just waiting our turn or agreeing that we can only be successful in the ways we have been told we can be and not creating anything new. We are not, as artists, creating art that does what it is supposed to do.
Art is supposed to show us the truth of the world. It is supposed to make us ask questions and encourage us. Art is not supposed to be marketable.
We are settling to create art that is marketable. I can't help but think how sad that is.
The other thing I have been steadily learning as I read and research is that many of the Christian artists who made it big and were big influences in the church in recent years have been losing their faith and leaving the church. What I have noticed about that is they are all artists who sing praise music because that is what sells. Praise music is fine. They are love songs to God. A good love song is beautiful but what happens on the days when I don't feel like God loves me? What do I do when I don't feel anything? We need music that teaches us. We need music that asks the difficult questions that we all end up asking of ourselves. Our praise leaders are losing their faith because they don't have substance to sustain them in the moments when the feelings aren't there. It takes more than feelings to be a Christian.
As a generation we need to be better than this. We need to be creating music and art not because it sells but because it tells the truth and we have to do it whether anybody is willing to let us or not. If we don't we are going to fail the generations coming up after us.
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