When I was an agnostic, I prided myself on my open mind. I listened to the full range of spiritual theories, from the sutras of Buddhists to the anathemas of Calvinists. Research trips took me to Russian Orthodox feasts and Mormon historical pageants. I found something to appreciate in all the approaches to the God I didn’t believe in. But I was dogmatic about one thing: If God existed, he did not endorse contemporary Christian music (CCM).
I can’t entirely explain the origin of this prejudice. I did not make a habit of having strong opinions about music. Until recently, I could not have told you the title of a single contemporary worship song. On principle, I usually defended evangelicals against others’ caricatures of them. But over my years as a historian and journalist, I had heard so many evangelicals themselves make snide comments about CCM that disdain of this music seemed like an acceptable prejudice—even a way to bond with insiders.
One weekend in 2008, during my doctoral research, I attended a conference at Willow Creek Community Church, the seeker-sensitive juggernaut northwest of Chicago. After the morning’s discussion on the future of megachurch discipleship, the lights dropped, lyrics flashed on the screen above the stage, and the bassist strummed his first chords. I remember sitting in the back of the sanctuary, squinting at my notebook in the ear-thumping darkness, thinking, A rock concert inside a church has to be wrong. Deep in the recesses of my mind, some part of me did find the melody kind of catchy, but that only sharpened my contempt.
Like most secular people, I had no personal investment in the boundary between sacred and profane. Yet I was certain that it was sacrilegious to sing about Jesus with multiple guitars, an electronic keyboard, and a drum set—not to mention the congregation’s vulgar clapping at the end. At that point in my plodding spiritual journey, I had never read the Psalms, so I had no idea that they command worshipers to “clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph” (47:1, KJV).
God did eventually make a Christian out of me about 14 years after my first encounter with sacred reverb in the Chicago suburbs. To my surprise, he did it in a megachurch—not in spite of contemporary worship music but with a strong assist from those simple lyrics and earworm melodies. I repent of my condescending attitude, and now I see this music and my own reactions in a broader perspective.
Today’s debates over contemporary worship music are the latest chapter of ancient arguments over how to reach the culture while preserving the gospel’s integrity and how to design a worship service that nurtures Christians while also captivating nonbelievers. I learned something too: A knee-jerk aversion to something may be a clue that God wants to use that very thing to humble you.
AlamyThe Christian message is strange, even offensive. Its moral claims have chafed against every society in different ways, but fundamentally, Christians insist that we need grace and can never earn it for ourselves. That’s a timeless insult to human pride. What’s more, Christians claim that God’s love is somehow compatible with an abundance of evil and suffering in this world—suffering that came to a cosmic resolution 2,000 years ago in the death of a man nailed to a Roman torture device.
Paul called all this a scandal. He spent his missionary career trying to make it comprehensible and palatable. That meant constant experiments in cultural translation—what he called becoming “all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9:22)—without whitewashing Christianity’s weirdest claims. Today’s contemporary worship music descends, in a broad sense, from two millennia of evangelists and artists trying to use music to do as Paul did: to entice seekers, disciple those already in the church, and worship God.
The songwriters of the Second Great Awakening borrowed fiddle tunes, jigs, reels, and other profane melodies. Christians who have adapted secular music for the church have not always gotten it right, and they have always irritated and offended other believers. Fifty years ago, Larry Norman and other Jesus People combined rock, gospel, folk, and traditional hymnody with lyrics on such indelicate subjects as “gonorrhea on Valentine’s Day.” Christian bookstore owners balked at stocking his albums—or they hid them in a backroom and under the counter for “fear that someone would come in and accuse them of selling that stuff,” Billy Ray Hearn, the founder of Capitol Christian Music Group, told historian Larry Eskridge.
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Some Christians still worry that sex and drugs contaminate all rock music. But by the 1990s, the most popular praise bands and Christian pop singers were catering less to rebellious teenagers and more to suburban moms looking to keep their kids away from MTV.
As a result, critics now lament blandness more than bawdiness. “All the songs sound the same, same repetitive chords and voices,” wrote one commenter on a Reddit thread titled “Why is CCM so boring?” A pastor named Joshua Sharp complained in the Baptist Standard that most “modern worship lyrics are just prosperity gospel and cut-rate therapy.”
Songwriters in the “Big Four” megachurch worship ministries—Bethel Music, Elevation Worship, Hillsong Worship, and Passion Music—have come to dominate the contemporary worship music industry with an ambient pop-rock sound that one agnostic friend of mine summarizes as “a bad imitation of U2.” Unlike reggae or gospel, this genre displays no distinctive musical characteristics. It is “aesthetically and biblically vacuous,” wrote pastor and Westminster Theological Seminary professor R. Scott Clark. “The principal function of most contemporary worship music is to produce a mild euphoria.”
Well, that mild euphoria helped save me.
The lyrics are simple, it’s true. But they are vacuous only if you sing those short lines of sans serif type on the overhead screen without thinking seriously about the ideas the words express. If that’s the case, then by all means, flee to the nearest plainchant compline service.
What defines the contemporary worship genre is dissonance—the incongruity between smooth harmonies, uncomplicated lyrics, and the shock that comes if you pause to grapple with the words’ meaning.
Consider the opening of Bethel Music’s 2019 hit “Goodness of God”:
I love you, Lord
Oh your mercy never fails me
All my days, I’ve been held in your hands.
Everything in these 19 words is outrageous: an all-powerful God who knows and cares for each person as an individual, who attends to every detail of our lives, and who not only loves us but also opens the way for puny mortals to love him back. Sure, this is preschool-level Christian theology. But Jesus told us to come to him like little children. If we hang on to worldly, grown-up notions of fairness and power, or “common-sense” ideas of what God ought to be like, we will always misunderstand him.
Mild euphoria during the worship set—a feeling that the sociologist Émile Durkheim labeled “collective effervescence”—can sometimes be a pagan, rock-concert buzz. But for many people, the sensory experience and easy tune are like a parent’s hand on a toddler’s back, guiding us toward what the Bible calls fear of the Lord. This is not (most of the time) a theological breakthrough or a mystical experience. It’s more like a shy and sideways glance at a Savior whose face is “like the sun shining in full strength” (Rev. 1:16, ESV). A peek is all most of us can manage most of the time.
A melody that sticks in the ear with a bass line that fills the chest have a way of breaking down our defenses. They can open the eyes of the heart to the wildly counterintuitive picture of the universe contained in Christianity’s basic creeds. They get stuck in our heads and keep working on us all day long. Bryan O’Keefe, a recent convert who attends McLean Bible Church in Virginia, told me, “When I’m hearing these songs, I start to mentally connect them to my own experience, and it starts to feel like something so much larger.”
Worship music ought to be both comfort food and bitter medicine at the same time. But what consoles the heart or shocks the palate depends on personal taste and cultural context. This may be the reason that God has ordained—or at least permitted—such staggering diversity (scholars estimate that, worldwide, Christians worship in nearly 50,000 different denominations, confessions, and associations of churches). Different people need different goads.
I know Christians who grew up in Baptist-inclined, nondenominational contexts and made their way to Anglicanism, Catholicism, or Eastern Orthodoxy—because the words and rhythms of ancient liturgy wrenched them out of their 21st-century American bubble and helped them recapture the mystery of the global gospel. But in my case, it was necessary to walk the Canterbury Trail in reverse.
Medieval choral arrangements and clouds of incense drew me into my earliest investigations of the faith. I grew up with no religion. During college, I followed my interest in Russian culture, language, and mysticism into an exploration of Eastern Orthodoxy. In graduate school, classes in church history led me to the Anglo-Catholic parish near campus.
I fell in love with these traditions—and still love them—because of their unapologetic strangeness. I wanted a space that felt alien to technologically enhanced, hyperindividualistic American modernity. Orthodox and Anglo-Catholic churches, so committed to preserving ancient forms, so oblivious to any song written in the past century, offered that.
The trouble was that for an agnostic church-history nerd like me, elaborate liturgy in a space stuffed with carvings, crucifixes, and stained glass offered endless excuses to think about many things that were not Jesus. Once, I gushed to the priest—who was too polite to chide me—that going to church made me feel more deeply connected to Western civilization. I don’t mean to sound like a 16th-century icon-smasher here (although I see where Zwingli was coming from). I’m making a less profound point about my own snobbery, temperament, and the human tendency to run away from hard things.
I listened to CDs of Russian monastic chants for hours, so busy trying to decipher the Old Church Slavic (I studied it for a semester) that I didn’t get around to facing the God those monks were praising and begging for mercy. I sat in the back pew during Sunday worship and thought about how much I loved to acknowledge and bewail my manifold sins and wickedness in the General Confession; the doctrine of original sin made sense to me long before I was even a theist. But my mind would wander more often to the literary genius of Thomas Cranmer than to the God-Man whose death gave depraved humans the nerve to ask for forgiveness—and the temerity to believe they can receive it.
Eventually I stopped attending the Anglo-Catholic church. Belief in God was still a shaky proposition for me, let alone the Incarnation. I felt grateful to these Christians who welcomed me without asking nosy questions or dragging me to coffee hour. But maybe it was time to accept that I was “religiously unmusical” —the self-description preferred by the sociologist Max Weber, who spent his career studying world religions but never professed belief in any of them.
I finished my PhD and spent the next dozen years reading books and archival documents, interviewing believers, teaching classes, and doing all the stuff that qualified me as an expert on American Christianity. I wasn’t happy being an agnostic. But I accepted my condition, since I’d been to all the doctors—at least the reputable ones—and none had the cure.
My story is my own, but the point is universal. There are many ways to fool yourself into thinking you have Christianity figured out, when really you have remade the Christian God into a deity that suits you.
God ambushed me about three years ago. I was writing a magazine profile of a local Southern Baptist megachurch, The Summit Church, based in Raleigh. The pastor there, J. D. Greear, turned our first interview into an ongoing conversation. He pushed me to realize that I needed to investigate the claims Christians make about history—that there were piles of books that do so meticulously. I should have read these books years ago, and I needed every one of their footnotes. Without them, I never could have gotten to the point of accepting that the New Testament documents are reliable sources and that the Resurrection is the best explanation for a very puzzling set of historical circumstances.
But while I was slogging through books like N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, I continued to attend Sunday worship at Summit. Each weekend, from my comfy upholstered seat in the nosebleed section in the back of the auditorium, I stared at the lyrics on the giant screen. I even sang them, because it was dark and loud and no one could see or hear me. Yes, it felt like a rock concert—one that, for me, removed the parts of church that I had turned into idols and excuses.
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Slowly I realized that there was nothing cheesy about singing “We are ransomed by our Father through the blood.” And maybe the melody wasn’t the only reason Charity Gayle’s “Thank You Jesus for the Blood” was stuck in my head the whole drive home.
Some caricatures of contemporary worship music do hit the mark. Many songs take God’s victory and care for his people as their main subjects, paying less attention to topics like sin and suffering. “Make way through the waters / Walk me through the fire / Do what you are famous for,” Tauren Wells wrote in his 2020 song. Or, from Passion Music: “There’s nothing that our God can’t do / There’s not a mountain that He can’t move.”
Three of the four big worship ministries lean charismatic, while Passion City Church is broadly Reformed—but both traditions share an emphasis on the transformative power of the Resurrection, a major theme in the New Testament, especially Paul’s letters.
If the point of communal worship is to tug us into a posture of praise when the rest of life pulls in the other direction, then it makes sense to sing songs that remind us of the cosmic victory that will, eventually, erase this world’s suffering, even when we are in the middle of it. “Yes I will, lift you high in the lowest valley,” runs the chorus of Vertical Worship’s “Yes I Will.”
Contemporary worship music aims to cultivate a certain kind of experience, a sense of intimacy with God that critics mock as “Jesus is my boyfriend” music. Without grounding in comprehensive biblical teaching, these lyrics could encourage a shallow emotional state that resembles junior high hormones more than submission to Christ. But there’s something deeper happening. Musician Melanie Penn told me that she sees herself “as a kind of heart doctor. I open the artery between head and heart.”
When Maverick City sings in “Communion” that “You are closer, closer than my skin / And you are in the air I’m breathing in … This is where I’m meant to be (right here) / Me in you and you in me,” they are in good company with the biblical authors, who frequently returned to metaphors of erotic love and marriage as they tried to help mortals grasp the magnitude of God’s covenant. During the Middle Ages, the Song of Songs was one of monks’ favorite biblical texts to write about—not because they were repressed celibates but because they grasped the divine intimacy made possible by Christ’s sacrifice.
No worship music, whether electronic or Gregorian, is meant to serve as a person’s sole source of spiritual formation. A Christian’s theological diet ought to be like the caloric kind—balanced, drawn from a variety of sources, and approved by experts who know something about nutrition. Preaching, prayer, Bible study, and other reading should bring forward the themes that get less attention during the worship set. And we laypeople trust that church staff are scrutinizing the theology of the lyrics.
In the anti-CCM corners of the internet, critics complain about the controversial theology and conduct of some of the ministries associated with popular songs—Bethel Church’s radical charismatic teachings; Elevation Church’s whiff of prosperity gospel; allegations of sexual misconduct and financial mismanagement at Hillsong.
But the songs their worship teams compose for broad consumption usually leave aside any theological irregularities in favor of mere Christianity, and the personal failings of artists or clergy do not detract from the orthodoxy of their lyrics. Cynics may say they stick to the fundamentals of free grace and God’s sovereignty to sell more albums among the widest possible range of churches around the world. The non-cynic in me (and converting to Christianity requires a leap away from the cynicism that’s so fashionable in modern culture) thanks God for weekly reminders of the gospel’s most basic claims. Cultural and political currents continually pull Christians away from one another, prodding us into fights over secondary issues. Contemporary worship songs bring us back to Jesus.
I sing them gratefully every Sunday. I drive my family nuts blasting them on the car stereo. And if they stop prompting wonder, I will not hesitate to dig out my Russian Orthodox chant CDs and my Book of Common Prayer. It takes the whole church to disciple a sinner like me.
Molly Worthen is a historian, journalist and professor. Her most recent book is Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump.
