Uh oh, CCM is in the news
Christian Rock Summer is returning
This is going to be a short one because I lost a good chunk of my week to Stellaris.
Lately I’ve been feeling really overwhelmed and vaguely anxious about everything. I want to move away from Des Moines before the end of the year, but I’m barely making enough money to pay bills let alone put moving money aside. The job market is the worst I’ve ever really seen it, with every entry level job listing for remote work being some degree of scam. I also want to grow Fruitless, but haven’t been having much luck with that. There’s a constant sense I need to be doing something to help some of my goals happen, that I end up just end up paralyzed and not really doing anything. So this week, I just crashed and played video games and blocked the world out for most of the weekend.
The last few days, I decided to go to the gym to see if that’d help my mental state. It seems like it’s helped a bit. I’ve applied at a few more probably-scam jobs, which makes me feel like I’m doing something to remedy my finances. I’ve also begun working on some stuff for the podcast, which feels good. I didn’t watch any movies this week, so this newsletter is going to be about stuff vaguely related to preparing for the next few months of Fruitless.
Welcome to the media round-up, a newsletter where I (Josiah) tell you about everything I’m watching, reading, listening to, and producing.
New from me
The last Fruitless episode of May released on the Patreon this last week. It’s another installment of the music exchange where Josh and I discussed Hot Fuss by The Killers and Blue Record by Baroness. You can find that episode here.
Christian Rock Summer, baby
As listeners to Fruitless may know, I like to devote a month of the podcast during the summer to talking about Christian music. I’m interested in that because I grew up in the evangelical world and have a complicated personal relationship to a lot of that music, and also because I think it gives you an interesting glimpses into the worldview and history of American evangelicalism.
Last year, I was focused mostly on artists that I actually like. There are a lot of exvangelical podcasts out there that talk about Christian music, and they usually go right for the funny and corny stuff, and I was interested in talking about stuff I’d still go to bat for. We did episodes on the metalcore band, The Chariot, the post-hardcore band, Emery, and the star of Christian indie rock, David Bazan and Pedro the Lion. Toward the end of the month, we pivoted to softer, worshipful stuff by talking to my friend Kim Hensley about her time as a church worship leader and the weird power dynamic that went into that, before ending the month on Rich Mullins.
This time is going to be a bit different than last year. I’m slightly less prepared, but also putting more research into it, so we’ll see how that all goes. I can say ahead of time that the first episode of July will be a big-picture survey of Christian rock. Now that I’ve done my month about people I like, we’re gonna do a month that’s much more of a mixed bag.
To get myself into that mindset, I’ve been reading God Gave Rock and Roll to You: A History of Christian Contemporary Music by Leah Payne, which has been a really great survey of Christian music and how the whole weird industry around it sprung up. Over the last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole attempt to create an alternate culture and all the contradictions that went into that.
This last week, one of the stars of Christian music—Michael Tait—has been accused of numerous acts of sexual abuse against young men. If you’re not from the evangelical world, this story might disappear from your head as soon as you read it. But this is kind of a bombshell for those who grew up in this subculture.
Michael Tait has been a massive figure in CCM since the 90s. He started out in a rap rock group called DC Talk, famous for singing the Smells-Like-Teen-Spirit-ripoff-but-with-a-rap-part-for-some-reason, Jesus Freak, which is a song that is both ridiculous but I catch myself humming unconsciously to this day. (“what will people think when they hear that I’m a Jesus Freak???”). Amidst 90s Christian rock, the only other band comparable in size to DC Talk was Newsboys, an Australia pop rock group that I still catch myself feeling defensive about.
DC Talk broke up (kinda) in 2000, but the Newsboys were eternal. They slowly evolved into this weird Christian supergroup that did a Ship of Theseus thing until they weren’t really the same band they were in the 90s. During that evolution, Michael Tait joined the band as lead singer. A lot of my love for that band got snuffed out during the Tait era. That may have just been a matter of me getting older, but I think I’ve mentally just blamed Tait for it.
Where most non-evangelicals know Michael Tait, at this point, is from hate-watching the God’s Not Dead movies. The Tait era Newsboys had a hit song called “God’s Not Dead” which is also the theme song of those horrendous films, and the first film ends at a Newsboys concert. It’s always funny when I’ve listened to podcasts that do episodes on the God’s Not Dead movies because, when the hosts aren’t former evangelicals, the whole stardom around Newsboys in the film is a bit surreal and feels completely astroturfed, which leaves me stuck yelling at my earbuds “No! There’s so much history here, you don’t understand!”
All this to say, though, the Newsboys are an interesting band because they have such an incomparable amount of celebrity within their niche bubble that they always end up reflecting the state of evangelicalism at any given moment. 90s evangelicalism was a bit more ambiguous about it’s political affiliations. It wasn’t shy about it’s conservative social views, certainly, but there was less of a direct attachment to the Republican Party. There would be figures within evangelicalism that would talk about racism or poverty in a way that would incite accusations of “wokeness” among today’s evangelicals.1 DC Talk was one example of this. Don’t get me wrong. They weren’t great, but they were into a very corny 90s, colorblind notion of opposing racism. For instance, their track “Colored People” celebrated the diverse “skin kaleidoscope” of God’s design and said we can solve racism by all coming together and sharing this world. As much as that might make you cringe now, it’s not that much worse than how most liberals thought about racism at the time.
By the late 2010s, however, Tait was openly supporting Donald Trump and increasingly contributing to right wing discourse. The Newsboys overall had come to be deeply affiliated with American conservatism, particularly because of their appearances in the God’s Not Dead movies.
All the while, it had come to be an open secret that Michael Tait was a closeted gay man and also likely doing drugs on tour. He abruptly stepped down from the band at the beginning of this year. The report that hit yesterday was a confirmation of what a lot of people were suspecting. There are accusations going all the way back to 2004.
More than any other subculture, CCM has huge moral expectations for their stars. Since the 1980s, CCM record deals included morality clauses with expectations about premarital sex or drug use. It’s hard to overstate just how insane some of these expectations were. In the 80s, there was a huge moral panic about CCM’s darling pop star, Amy Grant, wearing too low cut of a shirt on some album art. I’d heard about the “three-button controversy” before but never actually looked up the album art that caused it all until a few days ago. I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw it.
Scandalous!
These moral expectations continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s. In the 2010s, there was a bit of a rebellion against it, and there was a wave of artists slowly disaffiliating from the whole CCM world and then putting swear words in songs. But that rebellion was happening among slightly more edgy musicians, not Newsboys and the like. The pantheon of CCM never really budged on this stuff.
In 2025, I’m not quite sure how this all will play out. One thing that’s shifted in the past decade of conservative evangelicalism is the newfound opposition to “cancel culture.” This is really strange whenever you go back through the history of evangelicalism because evangelicals have always loved “canceling” people for moral failings. More and more, I think the infamous Access Hollywood tape was a watershed for evangelical culture. Anecdotally at least, it was the first time I saw evangelicals willing to put aside rabid moralism regarding sexuality in order to defend someone they thought had a useful political position. I think another event was the revelation that Josh Duggar had molested his sisters, which a handful of conservative pundits attempted to defend.
Despite these intense expectations being intrinsic to evangelical culture, conservatives have increasingly acted like there’s an external mob that weaponizes moral failings and seeks the blood of Christians. Suddenly, conservatives have talked about how they don’t care about their heroes’ personal lives and don’t think it should be the subject of a news cycle. A subculture that once made pop stars sign contracts saying they wouldn’t have sex outside of marriage began to start handwaving sexual assault allegations as personal matters or the mere failings of all-too-human men during their Christian journey.
So the script exists to try and defend Michael Tait. But I don’t suspect many will defend him, and there’s a pretty straightforward reason why: the victims were male. I think Michael Tait being gay will increase the likelihood that they go ahead and just throw him under the bus. Only time will tell.
I’m doing a lot of simplification. There were certainly openly political evangelicals that supported the Republican party, but there was more room for different types of evangelicals as well.