God Gave Rock and Roll to You

This highly anticipated history of Contemporary Christian Music does not disappoint. Mapping out the complex and shifting landscape of popular Christian music, Payne provides an indispensable guide to the soundtrack of millions of Americans' lives while offering a fascinating window into evangelical culture more broadly. * Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation * This wonderfully written, skillfully researched book adds much to what we know about popular religious music in the 20th and 21st centuries. Payne covers so much fascinating ground that others have not been over, illuminating a great deal about religion, pop culture, politics, and more. * Randall J. Stephens, Author of The Devil's Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock 'n' Roll * Fascinating! A fast-paced narrative as illuminating as it is cautionary about the powerful bond between Christian music and the making of white evangelical identity. Trust me-if you, like me, grew up with Amy Grant, you don't want to miss this book. * Beth Allison Barr, Author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth * God Gave Rock and Roll to You will take its place in the small canon of essential books on the subject. This is smart, historically accurate, sometimes humorous, and always gracious writing. It speaks to the genuine, heartfelt desire to honor God through music-how beautiful the impulse can be and how wrong Christians often get it. Easy to read and hard to put down. * Charlie Peacock, Grammy Award-winning music producer * God may have given Rock and Roll to white evangelicals, but as it turns out, they preferred a chimera instead: Contemporary Christian Music. As Leah Payne expertly shows in this indispensable survey, for several decades, CCM became a prized vehicle for the goal of many conservative religious movements: socialization and control. * Gregory Alan Thornbury, Author of Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music? Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock * [A] comprehensive and fascinating survey of a much-maligned yet influential musical genre. * Publishers Weekly * This breezy yet fact-filled romp through the Christian side of American popular culture from 1897 to the present will be eye-opening for many secular readers. * Library Journal * Dr. Leah Payne's book remains a significant contribution to this field of research. God Gave Rock and Roll to You is an impressive rendering of a diverse history and will serve as a standard work on evangelical cultural production. It is essential reading for those who want to deepen their understanding of late modern evangelicalism. * Tomas Poletti Lundström, Sociology Of Religion * Recommended. * Choice * God Gave Rock & Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music, a timely and much-needed addition to a historiography of American evangelicalism that has long overlooked its pop-culture expressions. * Paul A. Anthony, Religion * [A] valuable history...Payne surveys more than a century of American Christian pop culture and manages to cram an astonishing range of trends and players into a relatively slim volume. She is skilled at the art of transitional sentences (""Musicians were not the only ones to leave the CCM fold"") to keep the descriptive train on the tracks. This is high-quality prose that manages to sum up broad movements in compact phrases. * Los Angeles Review of Books * Payne plugs important gaps left by previous histories-tracing its roots in Pentecostalism,Southern nostalgia, and therefore patriarchal white supremacy, while making a strong case that CCM is not a frivolous outworking of evangelical priorities expressed more substantively elsewhere, but in fact is an important distillation of theological, political, racial, and gender assumptions that had significant influence on generations of young people. * Paul A. Anthony, Religion * Throughout this work, Payne tells wonderful tales familiar to many insiders but startling to outsiders. Payne narrates countless stories that stir nostalgic laughterand tears, joy and anger, and pleasure and groans-often at the same time. * Martin W. Mittelstadt, Canadian American Theological Review * This work is indispensable for understanding the world of evangelicalism and its music industry. Overall, Payne demonstrates the insights that can be gained by analyzing forms of pop art that others would be tempted to not take seriously. * Andrew Banacos, Pneuma *