When
rock ’n’ roll emerged in the 1950s, ministers denounced it from their
pulpits and Sunday school teachers warned of the music’s demonic
origins. The big beat, said Billy Graham, was “ever working in the world
for evil.” Yet by the early 2000s Christian rock had become a
billion-dollar industry. The Devil’s Music tells the story of this transformation.
Rock’s
origins lie in part with the energetic Southern Pentecostal churches
where Elvis, Little Richard, James Brown, and other pioneers of the
genre worshipped as children. Randall J. Stephens shows that the music,
styles, and ideas of tongue-speaking churches powerfully influenced
these early performers. As rock ’n’ roll’s popularity grew, white
preachers tried to distance their flock from this “blasphemous jungle
music,” with little success. By the 1960s, Christian leaders feared the
Beatles really were more popular than Jesus, as John Lennon claimed.
Stephens
argues that in the early days of rock ’n’ roll, faith served as a
vehicle for whites’ racial fears. A decade later, evangelical Christians
were at odds with the counterculture and the antiwar movement. By
associating the music of blacks and hippies with godlessness, believers
used their faith to justify racism and conservative politics. But in a
reversal of strategy in the early 1970s, the same evangelicals embraced
Christian rock as a way to express Jesus’s message within their own
religious community and project it into a secular world. In Stephens’s
compelling narrative, the result was a powerful fusion of conservatism
and popular culture whose effects are still felt today.
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