And now for a few more words on Christian rock. We have addressed it on the blog before, such as in Mike Iafrate’s exploration here and my thoughts here and here.

The top two responses, in no particular order, that I hear regarding the very existence, or even just the title, of the Rock and Theology Project, are: [1] You mean like Christian rock? [2] You mean like playing pop music in church?

I often have a negative reaction to these responses, and want to say something like, “No, no, no, it’s much more exploratory, curious, open and experimental. It’s about finding why theology and rock matter for each other, about why we think of theology as sacred and rock as secular, about how theology influences rock, how rock influences theology, how people live in both sacred and secular worlds; it’s about examples of all this, methods for studying all this, communicating these paradigms to academic theology and to rock culture. And for me personally, it is about studying how rock culture can and does condition spiritual identity and experience, with the latter having been thought to be the traditional specialization of theology.” That’s what I try to say.

But I remain curious about my negative reaction to the top two typical responses. What makes me uncomfortable about Christian rock, or the use of pop music in worship or liturgy? As I have pondered my reaction especially over the last decade, I have come up with one (to me) good reason for that unease, and also one criticism of my own unease.

The good reason for the discomfort is the way in which Christian artists and liturgists end up trying to drain resistant gestures from rock, as if rock culture is finally compatible with the theology one wishes to teach by crafting something called Christian music or housing “secular” music in a “sacred” space. This is not to deny new resonances that can happen when secular music is re-framed in Christian terms, songwriting-wise or liturgically, or to suggest that “secular” rock culture, on its “own terms,” is something unframed or atheological.

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