God Gave Rock and Roll to You, Leah Payne
God Gave Rock and Roll to You, Leah Payne
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God Gave Rock and Roll to You
A History of Contemporary Christian Music

Author: Leah Payne

Narrator: Leah Payne

Unabridged: 10 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/26/2024


Synopsis

Few things frightened conservative white Protestant parents of the 1950s and the 1960s more than thought of their children falling prey to the "menace to Christendom" known as rock and roll. The raucous sounds of Elvis Presley and Little Richard seemed tailor-made to destroy the faith of their young and, in the process, undermine the moral foundations of the United States. Parents and pastors launched a crusade against rock music, but they were fighting an uphill battle.

Salvation came in a most unlikely form. When a revival swept through counterculture hippie communities of the West Coast in the 1960s and 1970s a new alternative emerged. Known as the Jesus Movement—and its members, more colloquially, as "Jesus freaks"—the revival was short-lived. But by combining the rock and folk music of the counterculture with religious ideas and aims of conservative white evangelicals, Jesus freaks and evangelical media moguls gave birth to an entire genre known as Contemporary Christian Music (CCM).

In this book, Leah Payne traces the history and trajectory of CCM in America and, in the process, demonstrates how the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped—and continue to shape—conservative, (mostly) white, evangelical Protestantism.

About Leah Payne

Leah Payne is associate professor of American religious history at Portland Seminary. She is also a 2022-2023 Public Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), and her research has been supported by the Louisville Institute and the Wabash Center for Teaching in Theology and Religion. Her first book, Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century, won the Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 2016 Book Award. Payne's work analyzing religion, politics, and popular culture has appeared in the Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today. She is also cohost of Weird Religion, a podcast about religion and popular culture, and Rock That Doesn't Roll, a podcast about Christian rock.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jason on April 21, 2024

I enjoyed reminiscing about the music I grew up with, but I wish the author had been less obviously biased. I assumed an Oxford Press title would read less like a news jockey bestseller and more like an evenhanded scholary paper. I really don't know if I could take hearing the author say "white Evan......more

Goodreads review by Paige on March 30, 2025

Oh man, I’m gonna have to read this to get closure on all those years I was only allowed to listen to Christian music......more

Goodreads review by David on February 26, 2024

An impeccable accounting of Christian Contemporary Music that is exhaustive and funny. The book recounts the entire history of CCM in great detail starting with the early origins in revival meetings and concluding with the January 6th coup and the Asbury Revival. The book is incredibly researched and......more

Goodreads review by Rob on June 04, 2024

If I were reviewing this book based upon the depth of its research, the excellence of its writing, or the thoroughness of its scope - the score would be a five out of five. Unfortunately, this well-researched, excellently written, and broadly scoped work was tainted from the onset. It absolutely ree......more

Goodreads review by Jared on January 29, 2024

Meandering sequence of anecdotes that reads like a Wikipedia article in search of a thesis. Lots of interesting behind the scenes stories but mostly boiled down to “CCM produced bad politics.” Hard to take the author seriously when she consistently uses the widely panned white progressive term “Lati......more