Tara Isabella Burton

It's an unusual thing for multiple Christian artists to be on the Billboard Hot 100 at the same time, and that's happened right now.

That's Kelsey Kramer-McGinnis.

I am a reporter for Christianity Today, covering music and congregational worship practices.

and I'm an adjunct professor at Grandview University.

Barstool conversion rock.

It's sort of this, like, interesting web of things between masculinity, kind of conservative politics, country.

I mean, you even have, you know, Jelly Roll, Shaboosie, Alex Warren, a whole collection of, I would add, primarily male artists making this kind of faith-flavored music and really making breakthroughs with it.

There are some Christians who look at that and say, revival is coming.

There's a sign of something that's happening.

I'm less convinced of that, but I do think

It's an interesting question to ask.

Why might the messages in this music be resonating with people, especially young people at this moment in time?

I think there might be something to that, that there is a search for music that feels like it's looking beyond themselves, beyond the small kind of internal world and outward.

It's worth kind of saying, well, what else is happening around us?

Gosh, that's such a good question.

So I tend to talk about it like an industry.

So CCM is not a genre so much as it is like a media ecosystem that really became popular

in the 1980s and 1990s, at least popular in the way that it is now.

So this music mirrors what you'd hear on mainstream radio in terms of like style and characteristic, but you wouldn't have the objectionable content.

So think, you know, no sex, no drugs, those kinds of things.