777-jili-casino(RNS) — When former Christian artist Michael Gungor hosted a new spiritual community in Los Angeles for the first time this year. Worship began not with an organ blast or a video promo from a sermon series, but with the blowing of bubbles.
Gungor, aptly named ‘Play’, saw the event – featuring painting, dance, communal singing and meditation, but without religious faith – as a celebration that ‘redefines worship’.
“I want to be in a room and see each other’s eyes, smell each other and hear each other sing out of tune. This is something we have always done as a species,” Gungor said. “I think there’s something important, very earthy and human about it.”
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Gungor’s idea of worship was not always so experimental. In packed churches and concert halls, thousands of people once sang along to the band Gungor’s 2010 hit ‘Beautiful Things’, a song that became a staple on the setlists of youth group bands. But in 2014, Gungor’s criticism of the Christian music industry – as well as his public musings on Genesis as a poem rather than as historical fact – led to his expulsion from the Christian music industry. Now, after a long process of grappling with his inherited evangelical faith – documented on his podcast ‘The Liturgists’ – Gungor says he is more interested in embracing the present moment than adhering to a set of religious beliefs, although he describes Christianity as his “mother tongue.”
For those like him who have “deconstructed” – a popular term these days for the process of questioning and sometimes abandoning the teachings of one’s faith tradition – Gungor still sees a longing for ritual and for communal gatherings. He recognizes the power of the collective – and strives to write non-dogmatic music for collective, if not religious, worship.
“We’ve left behind some shame-based things and some dogmas that oppressed and hurt many of us, but now we’re kind of wandering alone… What are we missing? Is there anything we can find here?”
Over the past two decades, several powerhouses of contemporary Christian music—Audrey Assad, DC Talk’s Kevin Max, Hawk Nelson’s Jon Steingard, among others—have publicly left the CCM industry. For many of these musicians, questioning the theological parameters of the industry meant becoming unwelcome in mainstream CCM spaces. Years later, having questioned their beliefs, a handful of these former CCM artists are re-examining the faith in some way, trying out elements they had previously discarded and writing music for listeners who may be more spiritual than religious . In many ways, these artists’ break with institutional Christianity and their hunger for a broader form of belonging exemplifies this national religious trends.
One of the first CCM artists to publicly leave the industry was Jennifer Knapp, who entered the Christian music scene in 1998 with her debut album “Kansas.” But while Knapp was drawn to Christian teachings about human dignity and divine love, she soon realized that the Christianity promoted in the CCM world drew hard lines around who belonged and who didn’t. Her writings on the humanity of Christ and questions about the need for vicarious atonement – the idea that Jesus died as a replacement for humanity – began to draw criticism.
“I was already criticized at that time and told that you were no longer a Christian,” says Knapp. “And then I thought, oh, well, I wonder what you guys are going to think about my sexual orientation.”
In 2002, Knapp “hit the eject button” on the Christian music scene and its faith. When she returned in 2010, it was like a openly gay musician no longer publishing music under the Christian flag.
For longtime Bethel Music artist William Matthews, it was partly the rigid homogeneity of the Christian music industry that ultimately led him to walk away. Raised in the context of the Black Church of God, he was exposed to Christian music through spontaneous worship models promoted by Morningstar Ministries in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the International House of Prayer in Kansas City, Missouri. Although skeptical about the existence of hell, Matthews, who spent his evenings watching Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, was largely at home in the prophetic corner of the Christian music world. In early 2010, he led worship at the conferences of charismatic leaders Lance Wallnaunow known for his pro-Trump prophecies.
But in 2015, Williams found nonviolent Christian theology a more compelling approach. He watched as anti-immigrant rhetoric and opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement reached a fever pitch in evangelical circles and became frustrated with what he saw as the Christian music industry’s “conservative biases.” After nearly fifteen years of thinking that he had bridged cultures as one of the few black people in the white-majority evangelical world, he was dismayed to discover that many of those he had grown close to were ambivalent about laypeople versus racism.
“That made me really move away from Christian music,” says Matthews.
He attributes the seemingly conservative slant of the CCM industry to its target market of “white, suburban, Midwestern, or Southern mothers.” In serving this demographic, Christian radio executives and Christian bookstores have been known to censor songs or albums that cross conservative theological or political boundaries.
“What the CCM industry, or Christian music, sells is safety,” says musician Derek Webb, founder of the Christian rock band Caedmon’s Call. “The people who run or appear to police the CCM industry do not do so as a means of maintaining a moral plumb line.” Webb believes that the setback usually has more to do with the bottom line than with personal beliefs.
Despite the limitations of the Christian music industry, leaving the industry often means leaving behind record labels, the Christian music festival circuit and radio plays, and promoting music in a market that is much less defined. While some groundbreaking Christian artists like that Semler And Flamy Granttwo queer artists who have scored top spots on the Christian iTunes charts, found success through social media and streaming platforms, many former Christian artists are labeled as “too Christian” for mainstream music spaces and “too secular” for explicitly religious ones.
“Algorithmically, it’s kind of a no man’s land,” Gungor said. “I still have more listeners to ‘Beautiful Things’ than anything else I make.”
Making music for a vaguely spiritual audience may not guarantee commercial success, but if it means making music that feels authentic, then for many former Christian artists it’s worth the trade-off.
Known for his provocative approach to songwriting, Webb says his lyrics allow him to ‘throw off’ around a quarter or a third of his audience and gain new listeners every 18 months. After thirty years in the music industry, he is comfortable with ebbs and flows. In 2017, three years after his parting from fellow Christian artist Sandra McCracken, Webb released “Fingers Crossed,” an album documenting his departure from Christianity. But while he still considers himself an agnostic, his latest album, ‘The Jesus Hypothesis’, grapples more explicitly with Christian themes.
“I wanted to get back in the rubble where this was all torn down and burned down, and where I was here before with an axe, I want to come back in with a scalpel,” he said of the album.
Webb’s return to the rubble of his Christian faith coincided with a return to Caedmon’s Call, which recently produced a re-recording of his self-titled debut album in honor of its 25th anniversary. The 2022 release is emblematic of the way several former Christian artists have come back to reclaim elements of their religious heritage.
More than a decade after her return to the music world, in May, Knapp offered a reissue of her first album, “Kansas 25.” She graduated from Vanderbilt Divinity School in 2018 and now views Christianity as a source of wisdom whose teachings on liberation have fueled her own LGBTQ+ advocacy. The outpouring of support for “Kansas 25,” Knapp said, made her see her old music in a new light.
“If I ever had any bitterness about my role within evangelical Christianity, or concern that I might be restricting people, exposing them to too much religious trauma because of the conservative evangelical space I came from, this was a real joy to to be able to testify that our faith can teach us something, and that it can go beyond the harm that our smaller religious spaces sometimes offer us,” said Knapp.
Gungor’s next project grew out of his desire to see communal songs that trade religious lyrics for more universal themes, such as love and unity. This fall, he gathered with more than two dozen other songwriters in Colorado for a songwriting retreat to begin writing and recording music for the project, called The Mystic Hymnal.
After a long break in Christian music, William Matthews also releases new, honest songs about spirituality. Earlier this year he was invited by the evangelical authors of a recent anti-culture war statement to write and produce a corresponding album intended to call the church out of political idolatry. Titled ‘Return to love’ The September album was recorded by artists from different theological and political perspectives and is intended for people who are “full of faith or struggling to believe.”
“I’m always in the middle of wrestling. Is the church even important to my life?” said Matthews, who leads worship at a progressive LGBTQ-affirming church in Los Angeles where former evangelicals regularly attend. “I will say that in my life I have always somehow managed to come back. Maybe it’s cyclical. You always return home, to a feeling of home or to a better expression of home.”
