ABSTRACT
Some artists perform songs that are played regularly on mainstream Christian radio and climb the Billboard charts, where they might remain for more than a year! Other artists identify themselves as Christians and are well-loved by their audiences, as evidenced by album sales, but receive little radio play on either Christian or secular stations. What can the difference between these two groups tell us about the relationship of religion and popular culture? In particular, what can the relationship between groups popular in contemporary Christian music (CCM), on the one hand, and “hipster” Christian artists, on the other, tell us about processes of secularization? For several centuries, scholars have predicted the secularization of society, that
is, a diminishment of the importance of religion, and they have discussed and analyzed a range of theories about this process. Conrad Ostwalt argues that secularization is not a one-way street from religious to nonreligious, as early theories had contended, but can be best understood as a transformation of the relationship between religion and society in which “not only do we see religious institutions becoming more like the secular world, we also see secular forms of entertainment and culture carrying religious messages” (Ostwalt 2003: 31). This chapter explores music as a cultural and religious phenomenon, specifically
using the concept of secularization to focus on the relationship and the blurred line between two kinds of musicians: first, artists or groups who identify as Christian and who perform “Christian music,” and second, artists or groups who fall into the “hipster” aesthetic, who identify as Christian, and whose music may or may not be overtly religious. We begin by laying out the history of secularization and Ostwalt’s reformulation, then turn to a comparison of contemporary music. We will also define evangelicalism and hipsters before turning to specific songs to demonstrate differences in their approach and their relevance for understanding secularization. We argue that the phenomenon of hipster Christian music functions in a way that illuminates the interaction between religious and nonreligious realms. In this genre, there is no sharp contrast between the religious and the secular; instead, the sacred and the secular simultaneously influence one another, in a bidirectional relationship, just as Ostwalt describes in his analysis of secularization.
