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At Tooth & Nail Records, Beaujon discovers a label with equal parts dedication to Christian music, quality art, and business acumen. At Mars Hill Church in Seattle, Beaujon inspects the clean, hip spiritual clarity fashioned by Pastor Mark Driscoll and his church of fashionable twenty-somethings. (My favorite line: "Advertising executives would slide naked down a splintery board to reach these people.") At Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Music, he meets a series of people who are ambivalent about the industry of Christian-anything. At the Gospel Music Awards, Beaujon is fed up with mediocre music and Christian culture in general, but manages to say a good word about "the honest and deep beliefs" of people who work in Christian music.

If you're looking for ire, there's not much here—until the sections on worship music. Today's worship music, Beaujon writes, "is the logical conclusion of Christian adult contemporary music—not just unappealing but unbearable to anyone not already in the fold." He dissects the makeup of the modern worship song—openings that "portend the imminence of something celestial in glacial 4/4 time" and choruses that "could put U2 out of business for good, they're so huge." Worship music "isn't music to appreciate; it's music to experience." Even the lyrics focus on a relationship with Christ, rather than Christ himself.

Beaujon's beefs with worship music are predictable enough. What's compelling—and, frankly, admirable—is his determination to understand how evangelicals could like the music enough to sing it over and over (and over) and purchase enough CDs and concert tickets to keep an industry afloat.

Late in his sojourn into the Christian parallel universe, after numerous Christian concerts, interviews, and enough Christian pop to madden all but the most dedicated youth pastor, Beaujon attends a David Crowder Band worship concert. As impressed as he is with Crowder's performance, Beaujon doesn't appreciate what works about worship music until a moment in the concert when he notices—after initially not noticing—that Crowder has left the stage. The crowd still worships even after Crowder steps out of the spotlight. "There was only one star at that evening's show," writes Beaujon, "and he hadn't been onstage at all."

Which raises a question, one that Beaujon's project and the entire Christian music industry begs: What makes music Christian? Is it the mission statement of the labels? The theological content of the lyrics? The faith of the musicians or producers? The faith of the listeners? The profit margins devoted to the poor? Surely none of the above, for all exist on a sliding scale.

But the question persists, because in evangelical circles there's a lot of chatter and concern over whether particular music is "Christian" or "secular." Well—here's a fool's axiom: Both inside the parallel universe of Christian music and in every other universe, the only one who can make music Christian is Christ. No matter what we make of Bazan or Crowder, Rebecca St. James or Michael W. Smith, Mute Math or Newsboys—or, for that matter, U2, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Sufjan Stevens, and a million other acts—when we're talking about music, we'd do well to remember our categories are too simple, too inflexible, and too earthy to contain the truth.

Patton Dodd is the Christianity Editor for Beliefnet and the author of My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion (Jossey-Bass).

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Also posted today is:

Rock Un-Solid | When Christian bands bite the hands that praised them.

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June (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50