‘JESUS MUSIC’ CALLS OUT THE GENRE’S VIRTUES, SINS
Christian America loves to play the persecution card, as if the nation’s most dominant religion, with nearly 400,000 churches in the country, is having a hard time being recognized as a driving force of culture in the United States. It’s an easy thing to laugh about, 65 percent of America pretending to be the minority. But when it comes to Christian music, they might have a point.
The Gospel Music Association’s latest tally reports that 53 million Americans listen to Christian and/or gospel music “several times a week.” Yet, ask the average music nerd to name a contemporary Christian music act and there’s a good chance you’ll get a blank stare.
Despite selling out arenas, packing tens of thousands of people into music festivals and moving enough records to convince Billboard to have a chart specifically focused on the genre, Christian music is ignored as a prominent force in the pop-culture sphere.
That’s why “The Jesus Music” is the most important music documentary of the year.
Go ahead and roll your eyes. Sure, “The Sparks Brothers” has the hipster appeal music snobs get high about and “Summer of Soul” has the quality and zeitgeist we crave in a great music doc. But “Jesus Music,” which spans the lifeline of contemporary Christian music from its genesis in the Christ-fearing hippie sect of Southern California of the 1970s to the praise and worship tunes that launch today’s TikTok prayer hashtags, does what few rock docs can claim: It’s filling in a knowledge gap of something that’s been severely under-documented.
And unlike most of the genre’s hand-raising fans, this film isn’t afraid to point out Christian music’s flaws and foibles.
The film starts in Costa Mesa, Calif., during the hippie era when the evangelical Calvary Chapel dared to welcome people who wore jeans and eschewed shoes. That acceptance of “otherness” spread into the music, when Love Song, a band of young congregation members, was asked to play a youth function at the church.
And this is where the documentary proves its relevance. It could have given us fawning testimonials reeking with the revisionist history of nostalgia. But “Jesus Music” wisely dives into how controversial this strain of music was in the ’70s.
The context isn’t just important, it’s essential. One of the reasons Christian pop culture is so easily dismissed by mainstream America is because it’s so often presented with a sterile endorsement of being “family friendly” or “clean.” But, as “Jesus Music” reminds us, Christian music is often created with the same angst, confusion and passion as secular music. And its fans have the same unrealistic standards of expectation as rock or country acolytes.
That point is underscored as the doc moves into the ’80s, looking at Stryper’s hair-metal devotionals and the arrival of Amy Grant as the perfect girl next door singing safe, family-friendly songs that children actually want to hear. Grant is the fulcrum of this film (she’s also an executive producer), the perfect example of the genre as a talented and charismatic musician who appealed to the Sunday service crowds as well as mainstream music fans. Her story is most compelling when the fans turn on Grant after her divorce from Gary Chapman and eventual marriage to country star Vince Gill.
And as “Jesus Music” shifts into the ’90s and early 2000s, when the genre was so much more popular than most people realized, it examines an even more damning trait of contemporary Christian music: its lack of diversity.
It’s a bold but rewarding move. The easy play would have been to focus more on the crossover success of bands like Jars of Clay or DC Talk, and the film does that. But it gives more weight to Kirk Franklin’s experience as a Black Christian musician who had to become popular in secular America before the, largely white genre accepted him.
If there’s a fault of the film it’s that the current state of the genre, which feels as bland as its critics of yesteryear assumed it was, isn’t scrutinized enough.
Maybe that’s where a sequel comes in. And, this film, and genre, deserve a follow up. Because if we have dozens of docs about punkrock, Christian music could use at least a handful of documentaries — as long as they’re as honest and self-critical as this one.