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In other words, for Christian artists like Stevens, the divide between sacred and secular is not only obsolete—it never existed in the first place. Some expressions of Christian cultural theory imply that evil and sin can be avoided by listening to particular music; my local Christian radio station, for example, advertises with the slogan "Hear no evil," as if the results of the fall can be avoided by tuning to a particular bandwidth. If we simply avoid mainstream culture, the thinking goes, we will be safe from the influence of darkness.

Of course, this is a lie—one that makes sin escapable rather than pervasive, a disease that is "out there" rather than something that plagues all of us. And the inverse of this lie, that the only place that God can be met and Christianity can be lived is safe within the confines of our own evangelical subculture, is just as insidious. As David Dark (author of Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, the Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons) is fond of saying to refute this dualistic attitude, "There is not a secular molecule in the universe." Everything has been tainted by sin, but sin has not destroyed the original, image-bearing quality of that which God has created and proclaimed Good.

Turner, too, addresses this problem in Being There: "We imagine a sacred part of our lives which involves praying, attending church, singing hymns, and reading the Bible, and a secular part involving eating, drinking, reading the newspaper, and painting the house. Is that the way God sees it? Does he wish we'd hurry through the mundane but necessary activities of sleeping, child rearing, and earning our keep until we get down to the real business of Bible study … ? Would a really 'spiritual' life consist of a seven day week full of church-centered activities, or was the Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaaker right when he said that Christ didn't die in order that we might go to more prayer meetings but in order that we might be more fully human?"

Applying these rhetorical questions to popular culture, Turner may well have found their answers embodied among this new crop of Christian musicians who believe that the earth and everything in it belong to God. Take, for example, a conference held every other spring at Calvin College. Here, artists and audiences, critics and academics gather to exchange ideas, listen to each other's music, and participate in the weekend-long conversation known as the Festival of Faith and Music, or FFM. Although their music inhabits a variety of genres, from avant-garde to hip-hop to folk, these artists are interested in good craftsmanship, in producing original, creative bodies of work. Their faith also spans denominations—dyed-in-the-wool Catholics give workshops alongside happy-clappy evangelicals—but they come with a common longing: to see God's hand at work in the music they love, and in the music they themselves make.

For artists like Stevens, this conference is an opportunity to air their suspicions that this type of music cannot and should not be confined to a subculture. "Art is … a reflection of a greater divine creation. There really is no separation," Stevens told the Grand Rapids Press just before the festival. "There's a fullness of being in the world that takes into consideration the supernatural and the natural, and everything we do and say is evoking and expressing eternal things without even knowing it."

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