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What's your favorite band?" Youth pastors in evangelical churches from Anaheim, California, to Virginia Beach, Virginia, have been asking young people that question since Richard Nixon's famed meeting with Elvis in the Oval Office. Whenever teenagers answered with the Doors, Bon Jovi, Black Sabbath, or Run DMC, religious mentors steered their impressionable charges to sacred analogues: Resurrection Band, Barnabas, Stryper, Freedom of Soul. In the 1980s, popular Christian author J. Brent Bill created a "sounds like" music chart, an easy-to-use guide for those newly initiated into the Christian subculture. (It's the kind of tool Ned Flanders, the kind-hearted fundy on The Simpsons, would love to employ for his two sons, Rod and Todd.)
The relationship between so-called Jesus rock and secular music is as peculiar as it is fascinating. Since the Jesus People movement first swaddled the gospel in the tattered rags of the counterculture, Christian rock has grown steadily, inhabiting almost every niche in the splintered world of contemporary music. You want Christian death metal, Christian rap, Christian indie rock, Christian electronica? You got it. Part of the job of being a youth pastor today rests on being hip to the dozens of massive Christian rock festivals that take place around the country every summer, having a mental map of nearby Christian coffee houses and bookstores, and always being ready to usher teens into the safe world of Christian music.
In 2006, a youth pastor asked for a Christian doppelgänger of brooding English troubadour Nick Drake, doomed indie icon Elliott Smith, or cracked folk rocker Iron and Wine might respond with a single name: Sufjan Stevens. But Stevens is also quite original. While other artists have busied themselves chasing the latest fad, Stevens has crafted a unique, sprawling indie folk that deserves much of the attention it's received. He has also joined the ranks of a handful of other artists and bands—Danielson Familie, Damien Jurado, Pedro the Lion, and Starflyer 59—which have earned respect and critical acclaim almost in spite of rather than because of their Christian faith.
A Michigan native, Stevens was something of a musical prodigy. He attended Michigan's prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy, where he honed his skills on the oboe. He attended Hope College in Michigan, formed a band, and started piecing together his slightly outsider compositions with a few other sympathetic souls. From obscurity, Stevens has taken the college rock world by storm. His 2005 CD, Illinois—which occupied the number-one slot on college music charts for weeks in the fall of 2005, and has since received wide acclaim—and its recent companion disc of outtakes, The Avalanche, are part of his staggeringly ambitious project for a state-by-state romp through America. Stevens has done two states so far, the first being Michigan. Each release will be devoted to a single state, intended as a sweeping travelogue, a character study, and a window into Stevens' worldview.
Even a casual listen to Stevens' work reveals his fascination with Christian themes—creation, fall, and redemption. Take for example these lines from one of the tracks on Illinois, "Casimir Pulaski Day," a heart-rending exploration of theodicy (via the story of a friend's death from bone cancer):
All the glory that the Lord has made
And the complications when I see His face
In the morning in the window
All the glory when He took our place
But He took my shoulders, and He shook my face
And He takes and He takes and He takes
Certainly an overtly Christian message is a bitter pill to swallow for the average indie rock fan, but in song after song Stevens is open about his faith. As critical acclaim has mounted, though, he's become much more evasive when questioned about his faith. He routinely brushes aside the matter of his personal beliefs, strategically separating himself from the weird world of contemporary Christian music. He has a "knee-jerk reaction to that kind of [Christian] culture," he quipped in one interview. "Maybe I'm a little more empathetic … because we have similar fundamental beliefs. But culturally and aesthetically, some of it is really embarrassing."1 More bluntly, he has said, "I don't make faith-themed music."2
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