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The Christian pop culture world can be pretty big—and as you note, there are many segments of it that don't want anything to do with other segments of it. How did you choose which groups or individuals to write about?

They do intersect in important ways, and even if those intersections are often antagonistic, I think they're revealing, and I don't think you can understand one without the other. for example, the Cornerstone ethos is that the way to honor God is to create the best possible work of art that you can. This only becomes meaningful when you compare it with the point of the person who plays Bibleman, which is, "We do the best we can artistically, but at some point we say we've done enough because what is important is not the production but the message." While contradictory, I don't think you can really understand what they mean without realizing that the two views illuminate one another. The truth is that there is a lot of interplay.

You seem to see Jay Bakker as a good trend (a moderating strain) and Hell House as a bad trend (or a mean-spirited strain), but trends within the same Christian movement. What makes you think that they're part of the same movement, rather than parts of different movements?

Those are certainly the extremes. Jay's ministry is in large part a reaction to the history and tradition of things like Hell House. To understand where he's coming from, you have to understand where his parents [Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker] came from and where much of the church came from. He has, in many ways, a very reactive strain of Christianity. So his view of the world is informed by this kind of tradition. In that sense they are part of the same world. I've heard a lot of people say, "I never set foot in a Christian bookstore. That's not what Christianity is to me." In a way making the decision to never set foot in a Christian bookstore says something about the role of Christian bookstores in the culture, and what that person does says something else.

You also wrote, "I learned not to trust my first impressions." So what were some of your more unexpected experiences in the Christian subculture?

I did have some expectations about what I would find, and my initial experiences heightened those. I thought that the culture would be very conservative politically and socially. I thought that a lot of pop culture would be very agenda-driven, and in many ways, a little more than kind of a delivery mechanism for a conservative agenda — or not necessarily a conservative agenda but a religious agenda — an agenda. And it was very eye opening to find a Christian culture that was not trying to sell anything, that was not designed to be evangelistic or to enforce any kind of moral code, but that was really an expression of the artist's Christian worldview in honest terms with no sense of utilitarian purpose. I wasn't expecting that, especially after my first experience at that Christian rock concert.

One of my sister-in-law's friends came up after one of the band sets and said, "That was an awesome performance. They prayed three times in a 20-minute set." I thought, well, the whole point of Christian rock is not to perform rock and roll; it's to lead prayer. Rock is sort of the bait on the hook. But there are a lot of Christians who say that not only is that not what they're trying to do, but that treating art in that fashion actually cheapens God's creation. That was a way of looking at the world that I was not familiar with and that I found very compelling.

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June (Web-Only) 2008, Vol. 52