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record of this, it would indeed be the best Christian rock album of the decade.
@english_bob said:
(Fretboard won't let me type below the quote so I'll reply here)
Good points here (and apologies to OP for causing this total thread derail). I think it's even more complex again, actually. No small section of the audience for Christian rock are teenagers like I was, who weren't allowed to listen to the mainstream rock we really wanted to listen to. We were grateful for whatever we could get, and also pretty ignorant. I'd never heard Guns n' Roses, but I was sure I would like them because I liked Bride, who were marketed as the Christian Guns n' Roses.
Now I was a total zealot and would absolutely have boycotted a band for swearing or endorsing a doctrine I didn't like. Tourniquet criticised Kenneth Copeland in a song and I stopped listening to them (it's all very Judean People's Front). But lots of the audience for Christian rock was essentially captive. Maybe they cared about the bands' lyrics and lifestyles, maybe they didn't. It's leaders within the churches who hold a great deal of sway, because they were the ones that would be leading the burnings if you were deemed heretical.
Then again, when I spent a summer with a church youth group in smalltown Missouri in 2000, one of the kids had just destroyed his Creed collection after concluding they weren't true Christians, and the rest of them were debating if it was still OK to own MxPx albums because of a rumour that one of them had said 'piss' in a radio interview in Florida. Don't underestimate the young radicals.
But you're right about the artists feeling restricted. I remember an Amy Grant quote about how when people were passing joints at parties, no one ever offered her one.
It's fundamentally the least rock n' roll thing ever.
As for @Grumpyrocker 's point about people being glad to make a living, I do wonder how much money they can possibly have made. Some of the albums I grew up on are really well produced, mastered by people like George Marino and Bob Ludwig, photos by Neil Zlozower, all the trappings of a big major label release, but apart from Petra and Stryper none of them ever sold in numbers. Knowing how record deals are structured, the labels would have been making money, but the artists must have been scraping by.
But Grumpyrocker reminds me of a part in Butch Walker's autobiography where he had the chance to join a Christian rock band on tour and almost did because he was so desperate to leave his smalltown home and play. If he'd done it, the rest of his career since would probably have been impossible.
I had fun playing with the band despite me not being into most of the songs. My sub-par shredding was what they were after,(the worship leader knew his limits as an acoustic strummer) and once I was slotted in they quickly added a drummer and a brilliant sax player. And so sometimes we'd end up doing blues call and response stuff between sax and guitar and having a good old jam during our performances (ahem worship meetings).
I did know some American Christians at uni who had awful views on stuff such as Catholicism. But again, not many, I suppose the real hard core were less likely to come to the UK. I knew one British girl who married an American, and they ended up doing Missionary work in Europe because over here were were supposedly so swimming in the sins of things like tolerance of other faiths and sexualities. There's some really bonkers stuff across the pond.
Oh, and the record was fucking awful.
As I understand it, charts weren't calculated on every sale in those days because they couldn't be tabulated fast enough. It was a random sample of particular stores that were asked to report. So chances are they were all wasting their money. In more ways than one.
Yeah, it was that bad.
Oh yes. My wife works at an independent Christian school that appointed a new head over the summer with US-style extreme conservative views to go with the head of governors, who is cut from the same cloth. The stories she comes home with- a perfect blend of abuse of the Bible, authoritarianism and professional incompetence are fucking batshit crazy. Sad, because the previous head was a personal friend, far more moderate in his views and, crucially, actually capable of doing his job, and she has a ringside seat to the destruction of everything he built.
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.