Cross Over: The Rise of Contemporary Christian Music in the ’90s

You can categorize most forms of music by how the notes are both composed and performed. How people sing can also be an aspect of a given genre—the delivery, patois, cadence, etc. Yet the lyrics themselves rarely play a part in that core definition. Certain subject matters might be more common to one musical format over another, but if you can identify a style simply by the instrumentation, the words are a bonus.

Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) is the rare style of music defined by its lyrical content rather than what the actual music sounds like. As in, you can make CCM in the vein of country, pop, rock, alternative, jazz, soul, hip-hop—just about anything. It’s been an entire industry unto itself for over 50 years now, as it’s gone through a wide-ranging set of permutations and encompassed a range of subversive subcultures.

The only exception to such a broad description is traditional Gospel music—which actually proves the rule. Entire books have been written about how Gospel music— from both the white and Black aisles of the church—directly influenced the greater American music tradition, including country, rock, R&B, and more. With Gospel music, it was crucially important that the lyrics proclaimed the “good news” of Jesus Christ while the music edified the singers, musicians, and the people in the pews. 

My overarching thesis is that CCM pays the most attention to what you say first, and then looks at how you say it. In industry parlance, this was called the “Jesus-Per-Minute” ratio or “JPM.” The higher the JPM, the better and more Christian the music. Sure, some people believed that certain forms of music couldn’t truly be brought to heel by the lyrical content, but I’ve listened to some excellent thrash metal in my day that just so happened to extol rather traditional evangelical theology. And yes, I know that the idea of Christian music has been lampooned in pop culture for decades now. However, when you dissect those jokes—Hank Hill, Eric Cartman, etc.—you still see that they’re talking about taking regular rock and pop music and adding Christian lyrics.

Since CCM encouraged focusing on the “Why” of the song instead of the “How,” I had the freedom growing up to listen to a variety of sounds as long as people sang about God, Jesus, or an approved Christian topic. From my childhood in the ‘80s to adolescence in the ‘90s and my young adulthood in the ‘00s, I could still be “Christian” while figuring out what sorts of music interested me and without listening to artists deemed “dangerous” by my parents and church leaders. If the JPM was high enough, you could make music in nearly any genre you wanted and still be accepted in CCM.

Again, CCM exists exclusively for the words—both because it was about Jesus and because it discussed topics that were not of this world. My own parents shifted completely to CCM in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s because they didn’t want my brothers and me hearing about the topics discussed by their favorite rock and country artists. Try explaining to your four children between the ages of 2 and 10 about George Strait’s “Exes in Texas” or the juice flowing down Robert Plant’s leg.

We weren’t the only family to have such a story. In fact, that’s one of the primary reasons CCM became so financially successful in the ‘80s and throughout the ‘90s. It was a huge cottage industry created to provide consumer products to Christians who didn’t want “secular” goods and services in their homes. Christian record companies created these nifty posters to sell their music to moms who wanted Christian stuff for their kids: “If You Like This Mainstream Band, You’ll Love This Christian Band!” Any mainstream artist was up for comparison, and it often made selling the stuff very simple back when I worked in a Christian bookstore.

And it worked! Because of my mother’s own penchant for the rock music of her youth, she was more open than most parents of the ‘80s and ‘90s to the lyrics-first and genre-agnostic nature of CCM. Being introduced to a variety of folk, pop, rock, and gospel sounds prepared me to appreciate a spectrum of styles throughout my life.

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The history of CCM can be loosely categorized into four basic eras: the Jesus Music of the ‘60s and ‘70s, the Amy Grant ‘80s, the crossover ‘90s, and the Praise & Worship 2000s. For the purposes of this article, we can combine the early roots of CCM with the Amy Grant decade because she arose from that sound. She got started in the late ‘70s making Carole King-inspired folk tunes designed to be sung in Bible studies and church services. Writing much of her own music, she created songs that were obviously for Christians but that were ever-so-slightly influenced by mainstream music. CCM followed her lead and became a sales juggernaut by the end of the ‘80s, resulting in the tired (yet entirely true) joke that Christian music is often three years behind what was happening in mainstream music.

As the ‘90s began, Amy Grant became the genre’s first true “crossover” artist. Heart In Motion went quintuple platinum. “Baby Baby,” its lead single, went number one for two weeks. For CCM, this was a very good thing because evangelicals believed telling people about Jesus was a significant part of being Christian. Hence, Grant could be the artist your “secular” friends would listen to as proof that Christian pop music wasn’t ALL bad, nerdy, dorky, or uncool. You could then use her music to evangelize to non-Christians because she would sing to them about Jesus while they thought she was just singing cute love songs. 

All the big Christian record companies immediately started looking for additional crossover artists and big sellers. Like every record executive for time immemorial, they tried to capture the attention (and buying power) of teenagers and 18- to 24-year-olds. It certainly helped that Amy created her male counterpart in the form of Michael W. Smith—right down to the George Michael stubble and synth-laden pop ballads. He had his own crossover hit in 1991 called “Place in This World,” complete with a cowriting credit from Amy Grant.

I can already hear some of you saying, “What about Stryper?” It’s true that Stryper achieved mainstream notoriety with its brand of ‘80s hair metal on 1986’s To Hell with the Devil, but they were never part of the CCM universe. They signed to Enigma Records as a hair metal band that happened to sing songs about Jesus. In the CCM world, bands like Petra and Whiteheart wrote high-energy songs about Jesus, the Devil, and Hell that evinced the rebellious attitude of rock, complete with leather pants and pyrotechnics in live shows, while remaining within theological orthodoxy. CCM more than happily followed in the stylistic footsteps of whatever was happening in mainstream music culture to keep the attention of teenagers and twenty-somethings. Record companies just had to first clean up the imagery, smooth the rough edges, and make sure the artists sang about Jesus.

What made ‘90s CCM different from every other decade in the genre before or since is the “crossover” element. Several of the leading acts actively sought influence, respect, and impact from mainstream music critics and fans, while still being powered by the CCM industry machine. You had artists and bands purposefully writing songs that could be pitched to secular radio while still having the lyrical cachet to be played on CCM radio. 

DC Talk, CCM’s top hip-hop group, wrote a pop song called “Between You and Me.” An alternative rock band like Newsboys tried twice to cross over with “Take Me to Your Leader” and “Entertaining Angels.” Jars of Clay channeled ‘90s college rock with “Flood,” complete with a video that saw heavy MTV rotation. A jangly indie rock act called Sixpence None the Richer landed “Kiss Me” as the big single for a mainstream high school romance movie! All of those acts and more sold cassingles and CD singles in mainstream record stores as a way to minister to non-Christians intentionally. 

This crossover success in the ‘90s bled a bit into the early ‘00s, as Christian labels capitalized on the fresh influx of bubblegum pop that took over mainstream radio. There were multiple Christian versions of Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys, lots of singer-songwriters strumming acoustic guitars, and every possible strain of pop-punk imaginable. Once again, CCM record executives sought a way to earn mainstream sales figures while also making music safe for traditional Christian audiences.

But a problem eventually emerged from the heart of CCM itself: Long-time fans thought these crossover acts were watering down the message of Jesus. As in, Christians thought the lyrics of the popular CCM acts who made it mainstream radio didn’t talk about Jesus enough. Instead of being lauded for evangelizing secular audiences, these singers and bands were accused of selling out their beliefs for the world’s money and fame. Amy Grant faced severe backlash by getting a divorce and marrying Vince Gill. Michael W. Smith and Newsboys retreated into CCM. DC Talk literally broke up. Jars of Clay and Sixpence eventually quit making music rather than being subsumed by the CCM machine. 

Ultimately, even after an entire decade where the mainstream profile of Contemporary Christian Music was higher than ever, the lyrical content still proved more important than the musical quality. No matter how many metaphors about Christian themes you could work into the tune—“Flood” literally featured lyrics about getting pulled out of floodwaters by a savior figure when the singer realizes they need help—it wasn’t good enough if that song didn’t explicitly say Jesus and Christian theology. The JPMs mattered. They have always mattered.

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To be clear, there were plenty of CCM acts who had no desire to crossover. The buying power of Christian audiences resulted in multiple artists having multiple albums go gold and even platinum. The classic CCM “stay three years behind the mainstream” musical formula worked, as long as you sang openly about evangelical Christian values. You just couldn’t be too arty, coy, or poetic. Even still, the JPM Ratio eventually impacted CCM artists who never made any attempt at mainstream success. Formerly popular pop and folk acts faced dwindling sales at the end of the ‘90s because their lyrics didn’t meet the demands of the audience.

Despite that drama with the Nashville-based Christian pop music industry, the artists and labels who fell in love with “alternative” music in the 1990s found plenty of room to expand and grow their sound. This led to a more long-lasting and influential batch of crossover acts who never set foot inside the traditional CCM machine. You could even make the case that some of the most influential emo and hard rock bands of the ‘00s—Underoath and The Devil Wears Prada, for example—were explicitly Christian. Even popular acts like Switchfoot and Relient K called themselves “Christians in a band” instead of a “Christian band.”

However, ‘90s alternative Christian rock contained a sizable weird factor that most people—even those who only listened to CCM—will ever recognize. As in, these acts comprised Christians and they made actual of-the-moment alternative rock. Known in some circles today lovingly as “Chrindie,” the scene directly mirrored the ‘90s indie rock scene, complete with a heavy reliance on West Coast acts and struggling record labels that ran on shoestring budgets.

I could give you a litany of these bands and record labels that fueled my high school and early college years. I could wax nostalgic the six years I spent selling Christian rock music in the independent Christian bookstore where I met one of my best friends. We could chat about the many prominent music writers, PR agents, and record label executives who grew up in this world. Some of these acts have come to be recognized as musical innovators by mainstream culture, even as CCM never appreciated them.

Right off the bat, the majority of Chrindie bands were just too aesthetically too left-field to cross the normal CCM divide. Most of them didn’t have a high enough Jesus-Per-Minute ratio, but even if they had been, there would have been no place for industrial, ska, metal, or shoegaze on your average CCM radio station. If you were lucky enough to live in a city with a large enough Christian radio station, you might have enjoyed three hours per week with Christian rock—but most of that would still have been the DC Talks and Newsboys type bands who were signed to major CCM labels.

Think of it this way: As proper Gen Xers, all ‘90s music fans desired authenticity, but the real difference between mainstream alternative and Chrindie was a reflection upon the style-less nature of CCM. With secular music, people found an underground band first, and if they blew up to become popular and crossover to being radio-friendly, you called them sell-outs and then found newer similar-sounding bands who stayed in the underground. You couldn’t lose your scene credibility. While a few popular radio bands had some underground cachet, they had to work extra-hard to placate the gatekeepers.

Nearly every Chrindie fan I’ve ever known took the opposite path. They went from the mainstream to the underground. They began by listening to a safe band pushed by one of the big CCM labels on your local Christian station, and usually stayed there because the Christian underground was so tiny in the pre-Internet era. Your journey into Chrindie only occurred if you were lucky enough to find someone to point you in the direction of the stuff that CCM radio stations didn’t dare play. 

Some people had an older sibling or friend in youth group who would trust you enough to show you the real Christian alternative rock. It helped if you weren’t a nerd who would tattle to the youth pastor. Those elder guides would then introduce you to the few Christian magazines willing to talk about Christian bands you’d never hear on the radio. If you were nervous about leaving behind CCM, you could read 7ball to learn about the bigger alternative acts. Once you started listening to the harder stuff, you’d find your way to Heaven’s Metal (aka HM), a long-time magazine with its roots in ‘80s hair metal. But the main magazine for the era—complete with mail order forms for the most niche of alternative CCM—was True Tunes.

If you were really unsure of where to start, you could also purchase a “sampler” album created by Chrindie record labels and sold for cheap in some Christian bookstores. Instead of fighting CCM radio stations for airtime, these small labels created inexpensive compilation albums to introduce a whole bevy of bands to people in one fell swoop. If you were extra lucky, someone in your Christian bookstore would even be a Chrindie evangelist. And while I didn’t have such a person as a teenager, I became one in college when working in The Christian Source, conveniently located in a suburban mall.

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When it comes to ‘90s Christian alternative rock, It would be easy to write solely about Tooth & Nail Records in this essay. For many people, Tooth & Nail was, is, and will always be the Christian alternative label. To be fair, they basically were, but they also stood squarely on the shoulders of the bands, acts, and influences that came before them. Going into the ’90s, all of the weird Christian acts in the ‘80s had coalesced around a handful of top-flight creatives, nearly all of whom were from Nashville or Southern California. They either toured together, performed in each other’s bands, or saw each other regularly at big-name annual festivals, especially Cornerstone. 

What Brandon Ebel of Tooth & Nail basically did was learn how to run an indie label from his forebears and then turn it into a more profitable model. As many of the acts who’ve been signed to that label over the years will tell you, he did exactly that—while somehow releasing music that youth pastors across American Christianity could effectively sell to parents. And yes, convincing parents that alternative Christian rock was Christian enough was still important. 

That’s why the first wave of Tooth & Nail bands almost sank the label, as industrial acts, crusty punkers, math rockers, and rockabilly groups did not connect with CCM at large. It’s only when the label realized that some of their acts might need to pay homage to the JPM Ratio that its fortunes improved. The wider crossover trend in mainstream CCM extended to alternative Christianity because those “If You Like This Secular Band, You’ll Love This Christian Band” posters had more acts to use as examples than ever.

However, much like traditional CCM, most Chrindie acts had a “ministry” component to their art. The difference is that, while many people in those bands were actively evangelical Christians who wanted to make music for Christians, they did not want to make safe pop for Christian radio. They felt Christian kids deserved high-quality rock, rap, indie, metal, dance and more made by people who shared their faith. Smaller labels like Five Minute Walk, Frontline, Facedown, Northern, and N*Soul believed that you could make Christian music that focused on the “why” and “how” like regular CCM never could or would. Unfortunately, by trying to exist outside of the CCM machine, most of these labels and their acts barely broke even, as they existed on thin production and touring budgets. They spent most of their tours visiting evangelical youth groups in hopes of making enough money to buy food and gas to make it to their next ministry opportunity.

By the early ‘00s, Tooth & Nail had sucked all the air out of the room. They had the funds to sign more bands, give them larger production budgets, and send them on better quality tours without everything needing to be about ministry. The smaller labels and bands simply couldn’t compete, and they either quit or signed to the biggest indie still standing. 

Tooth & Nail even started multiple sub-labels for the prominent strains of alternative rock. The flagship brand had Starflyer 59, MxPx, The Juliana Theory, and Further Seems Forever making the artier rock, and Solid State had Zao, Underoath, and Living Sacrifice making metal and hardcore. BEC had lighter fare like Jeremy Camp and The O.C. Supertones that actually made it to CCM radio, while Platiqmusiq had the friends of Joy Electric creating weird dance and synth oddities. 

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All of this music was a revelation to me. It sounded nothing like what I heard played on CCM radio. This stuff had edge. It felt subversive, even compared to the ‘90s mainstream alternative acts I heard on the radio. I could talk to my friends in Boy Scouts about Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins, and I could talk to my friends at church about Point of Grace, Sandi Patty, and Wayne Watson, but I couldn’t talk to any of them about Five Iron Frenzy, Plankeye, and GRITS. I felt cool in spite of the fact that nerding out on underground Christian indie rock was definitely not cool. It was my first taste of indie rock snobbery, and it definitely wasn’t my last.

Ultimately, the ‘90s were an absolute boomtown for alternative Christian music. More acts than ever before wanted to make music, and CCM was more interested than ever before in crossing over to the mainstream. Instead of being pigeonholed into the adult contemporary world of Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Carman, you could make metal, hardcore, ska, punk, and arty indie rock while still calling yourself a Christian band. All you needed was a couple of singles with a high enough JPM ratio that you could pass the youth pastor and parent barriers. Sure, there were still plenty of parents, Christian groups, and church officials who openly castigated the more extreme genres, but those folks barely tolerated anything that strayed too far from traditional gospel anyway. 

Besides—it’s always been about the lyrics.

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