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For years now some of us have been agitating for a change in the way "Christian music" did its business.

Today, we're surprised but pleased to see so many bands with Christian roots making such strong headway into the mainstream of American cultural life. In one recent week, Underoath sold 97,000 units of its record, making it the No. 2 album in the country. Bands like Switchfoot, P.O.D., The Fray, and many others are now regulars in the mainstream scene.

And now Mute Math is on the way, but not without problems—starting with its own record company. The alternative rock band, which started out as Earthsuit, used to be with Sparrow Records, a Christian music label (now EMI/CMG). Realizing that Sparrow would give them little access to the mainstream, the band re-formed as Mute Math and signed with Warner Bros. in an attempt to have more impact on the culture at large.

But then came a bump in the road: Warner also owns the CCM label Word, which began marketing Mute Math as a "Christian band"—a designation that effectively tells the wider culture "this band is for Christians and not for you."

Mute Math fought back—with a lawsuit. Even though the band's members are Christians, they didn't want to be marketed that way. I don't blame them, but some people do—including Christianity Today's Rob Moll, who recently wrote that he finds it "hard to respect" Christian artists who are "spurning the industry that gave them their start."

Such reactions are misguided. Instead of blaming the artists who are trying to impact the cultural mainstream, some CCM executives, who seem unwilling or unable to help these artists reach their goals, shoulder some of the blame for holding them back.

And Mute Math is trying to do just that—though they're hardly the first. I've been questioning the system for over a decade.

In 1995, CCM magazine allowed three of us—Kerry Livgren of the band Kansas, the classical music scholar Patrick Kavanaugh, and me—to challenge the very existence of the genre in an article titled, "Does CCM exist? Should It?"

That led to other pieces for Regeneration Quarterly and Billboard that compared CCM to the old Negro Baseball League, arguing that just as the NBL had a vested interest in keeping its players from breaking the color barrier, so CCM's leaders, for financial reasons, were often standing in the way of their artists being heard by the wider "secular" culture.

I later wrote two books on the subject, and have heard from many leaders in the CCM industry who privately supported my views, which told me that it was a system that few of even its proponents supported in private.

That "system" had been created by people like Billy Ray Hearn of Sparrow Records and Mike Macintosh of Calvary Chapel who had said of the mainstream, respectively, "I never wanted to be a part of that world, and I got out of it," and "We had just come out of Egypt and we didn't want to go back." They in turn passed on a business model to a succeeding generation for whom its central organizing premise—escapism—was no longer operative.

Through the years, others have weighed in—like Charlie Peacock with his book At The Crossroads and Steve Turner with Imagine. And all of us took our cues from writers like John Fischer, Bob Briner and others who passionately argued against a culture of separation in popular music.

Bands like Mute Math are simply following the formula that worked so well for Switchfoot: Leaving their CCM label, signing to a mainstream label, and then giving a CCM label the rights to market and distribute their record to the Christian sub-culture.

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