Chapter 1: How has Christianity become mainstream in recent years?
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A few years ago, songs that were topping the Billboard Hot 100 might have sounded like this. Or this. But lately, the songs that are getting the most replays are sounding more like this. And a little further down on the charts, like this. Are you picking up what I'm putting down? The Hot 100 has been getting a heavy dose of piety and prayer lately.
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.
She even has a name for this unusual amount of faith-flavored music on the charts.
Barstool conversion rock. It's sort of this, like, interesting web of things between masculinity, kind of conservative politics, country.
It's the type of music two guys can share a beer over and reflect on the simple things in life, like the goodness of God.
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Chapter 2: What trends are we seeing in the Billboard charts for Christian music?
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.
And it's not just the Hot 100. Over the past years, Spotify streams of Christian contemporary music have grown 60%. The market and appetite for Christian music seems to be swelling.
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?
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Sign up today at plus.npr.org. And I also left you a link in the description of this episode. Thank you so much. Okay, so I need a little bit of context. So to start us off, what exactly is Christian contemporary music or CCM?
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.
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