Author Meets Critics: Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Author Meets Critics: Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2024). In this panel, critics will engage Payne’s work, which traces the history and trajectory of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) in America and argues the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped - and continue to shape - conservative, (mostly) white, evangelical Protestantism. For many outside observers, evangelical pop stars, interpretive dancers, puppeteers, mimes, and bodybuilders are silly expressions of kitsch. Yet Payne argues that these cultural products were sources of power, meaning, and political activism. Through the almost billion-dollar industry of Contemporary Christian Music, Baptists, Holiness People, Pentecostals, and Charismatics, who made up a sizable majority of the industry, created the political imaginary of white American evangelicalism. Through CCM’s twenty-first century successor, the so-called worship industry, those Charismatic and Pentecostal political and theological visions have gone global.