Chapter 1: What personal experiences connect music and faith for the host?
So here's a little secret. When I'm feeling particularly anxious or a little scared, I have an emergency playlist of gospel songs that almost always makes me feel better. Like this one. Or this one. Christian music, particularly the old school stuff my parents used to listen to, has always made me feel hope, feel inspired, feel calm.
But now, it seems more and more people, not just pastor's kids like me, are turning to Christian tracks for that same reason. Worship songs had a big year in 2025, with Christian artists going viral on TikTok and rising on the Billboard charts. What's behind all of this? Besides God, of course. That's coming up on Today Explained from Vox.
Chapter 2: How has Christian music gained popularity in recent years?
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This is Today Explained. Elias Light is a music reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He's been writing about the rise of Christian music this year.
Billboard ran a piece back in May about how there were two Christian artists on the Hot 100 simultaneously, which hadn't happened in a really long time. And then also there's a kind of a separate data company called Luminate, and they publish twice a year reports on kind of listening behavior and tracking how different genres are doing.
And in two consecutive reports, they sort of flagged that Christian music was growing really fast. So that kind of got me intrigued that maybe it was something to dive into. How popular has Christian music gotten? What was the data that was really drawing you in? Yeah, so I think there were two kind of key points.
One is there were these two songs that were both on the Hot 100, one by Forrest Frank. And the other by this guy, Brandon Lake.
And the other was just the speed at which it was growing.
It's still like a relatively small genre compared to pop or hip hop, but it's been expanding really quickly. And it's not that far away now from electronic dance music in the US, which is what, you know, kind of what we think of as one of the big traditional genres.
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Chapter 3: What data shows the growth of Christian music on the charts?
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Lord, Father God, bring us this today explained, and may it nourish our news.
I'm Charlie Harding. I am the host of the podcast Switched On Pop. It's a music podcast. I'm also a music professor.
Yes, and the perfect person to talk to because we just had a conversation with Wall Street Journal's Elias Light about how Christian artists have embraced a wider variety of sounds this year and have really broken through via on pop charts or just culturally in 2025.
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Chapter 4: What defines the genre of Christian music today?
You know, you're going through moments of reflection, then a kind of like culminating, whether a sermon or particularly in gospel experiences, a louder portion of the service. And then it does return to the kind of reflection at the end. The other song that popped in my head, now that we're talking about things building, is like Lil Wayne's Let the Beat Build. Yeah.
which I think is like a Kanye gospel track too. That's a song that also takes those little steps. I don't know if he thought he was making a gospel anthem. I can see how the slow build formula is a successful one.
Well, you know, I don't love mentioning him because he always wants so much attention, but Kanye has taken that religious turn in his music as well. But what's interesting about Coldplay is that...
I think of them as actually sort of like religious music for secular people, that the experience is that community gathering, that feeling of being a part of something bigger, that song form, and it turns out that they are incredibly influential in the world of worship music. And worship music is sort of modern evangelical music. It has that same song form. It's kind of like soft rock adjacent.
It's got to have at some point when those electric guitars go... Everything builds and explodes. And then the final moment of, you know, solemn prayer.
When heaven and earth were face to face Oh, how the world forever changed For God is with us
And so there are so many groups like Hillsong or Maverick City Music who are borrowing from those Coldplay playbook.
Why do we think it's taken to a 2025 for, like, even this Christian contemporary to have its kind of mainstream turn if we're thinking about artists like, you know, Forrest Frank or others?
Yeah, Forrest Frank, Your Way Is Better was a big hit this year. Very different style song than Alex Warren's Ordinary. Miles Smith had a great track called Stargazing, another one of those great epic building songs.
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Chapter 5: How do contemporary Christian artists blend secular sounds?
Do we have any signs then about what might be on tap for 2026? Can we expect Alex Warren-style power ballads? Can we expect this kind of moment of inspirational Christian music to continue? Or is there something else afoot that you see in the trend lines that you can tell us might be on the charts come 2026?
Here's the thing, Christian music has always been huge. It doesn't get a lot of mainstream media attention, and so it might seem smaller than the actual listening audience is. Now that we're seeing what people are listening to is streaming, it's very clear that there is great demand for songs like Ordinary by Alex Warren.
When you have that big of a breakout hit of something which is a little bit left field, we're not expecting it. what you get are follow-ons. It's like when Billie Eilish came out, you got a hundred mini Billie Eilishes the next year. I think we're going to hear a lot of Alex Warren sound-alikes in the following year.
I think there is a desire for music that provides a connection to a higher calling, that at least gives us a reprieve from the otherwise constant barrage of challenging news. And so I think we're going to hear a lot more of this kind of sound in the coming year.
That is songwriter and music professor Charlie Harding. You can hear him on his own podcast, Switchstorm Pop. Today's episode was produced by Hadi Mouagdi, edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore.
The rest of the team includes Avishai Artsy, Miles Bryant, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Danielle Hewitt, Kelly Wessinger, Ariana Aspadu, Noel King, and Sean Ramoswaram. Our deputy EP is Jolie Myers, and our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. I'm Astead Herndon. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The show is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
For more award-winning podcasts, visit podcast.voxmedia.com. You can listen ad-free by signing up at vox.com slash members. And check out Explain It To Me, now in our feed every Sunday morning.
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