Author Meets Critics: Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Author Meets Critics: Leah Payne’s God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2024) In God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music, Leah Payne traces the history and trajectory of Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) in America and argues the industry, its artists, and its fans shaped - and continue to shape - conservative, (mostly) white, evangelical Protestantism. For many outside observers, evangelical pop stars, interpretive dancers, puppeteers, mimes, and bodybuilders are silly expressions of kitsch. Yet Payne argues that these cultural products were sources of power, meaning, and political activism. Payne draws on in-depth interviews with CCM journalists, publishers, producers, and artists, as well as archives, sales and marketing data, fan magazines, merchandise, which made CCM a thriving subculture. Through Contemporary Christian Music, Baptists, Holiness People, Pentecostals, and Charismatics, who made up a sizable majority of the industry, created the political imaginary of white American evangelicalism through popular music. Ultimately, Payne argues, CCM spurred evangelical activism in potent and lasting ways. The business of CCM served as a vehicle for making Pentecostal and Charismatic ideologies and cosmologies mainstream in evangelical circles, and the industry’s global commercial networks helped to transmit them far beyond the boundaries of white evangelicalism in the United States. Through CCM’s twenty-first century successor, the so-called worship industry, those Charismatic and Pentecostal political and theological visions have gone global. Panelists: Erica M. Ramirez: Dr. Erica Ramirez is Director of Applied Research at Auburn Seminary. She was previously the Richard B. Parker Assistant Professor of Wesleyan Thought at Portland Seminary in Oregon. Erica holds a PhD in Sociology of Religion from Drew University, and an MA in Religion in Public Life from Wheaton College. With interests in religion, contemporary politics, and culture, Ramirez is particularly interested in “how radical religious traditions present as a challenge to and resource against social oppression.” Dr. Ramirez has recently written about evangelical politics for The Washington Post, Religion News Service,and Political Theology Network. Dara Coleby Delgado (University of Dayton) is the Bishop James Mills Thoburn Chair of Religious Studies and Assistant Professor of History and Religious Studies, as well as affiliate faculty in Black Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. Coleby Delgado is a 2023–2024 Public Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and the managing editor for Pneuma the Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. Her research interests include Race, Gender, Public Policy, and Popular Culture in American Religious Life, and has been funded by the AAUW Dissertation Fellowship (2018-2019). She has written about American religion broadly and Pentecostals/Pentecostalism narrowly in scholarly journals, edited volumes, and popular news outlets, and she is continuing her socio-historical examination on Bishop Ida Bell Robinson, founder of the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, in a forthcoming book. Daniel Ramírez: Dr. Daniel Ramírez is Associate Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate University. His research interests lie primarily in American religious history and Latin American religious history both within and outside the United States. Ramírez is author of Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), and is working on several projects, including Pentecostalisms of Oaxacalifornia, which examines the growth of Pentecostalism in the heavily indigenous transnational expanse of the Oaxacan homeland and labor diaspora and explores the challenges the new religious pluralism poses to ancient religious, cultural, and political folkways; and another book, Alabaré a Mi Señor: Latino and Latin American Sacred Musics, which takes up the ethnomusicological method and questions embedded in Migrating Faith, and applies these to a comparative study of Catholic, historic Protestant, and Pentecostal religious musics. Sam Kestenbaum: Sam Kestenbaum is an award-winning journalist covering religion in America. His work on Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone Magazine, and elsewhere. Kestenbaum’s reporting on Charismatic and Pentecostal practitioners was recognized in 2023 by the American Academy of Religion for In-Depth Reporting on Religion that “is remarkably fluent and engaging; each article… makes a little-known dimension of modern religion vividly accessible.” Respondent: Leah Payne is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Portland Seminary and author of God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music (Oxford University Press, 2024). She is also a 2023-2024 Public Fellow at the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), and her research has been supported by the Louisville Institute and the Wabash Center for Teaching in Theology and Religion. Her first book, Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century, won the Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 2016 Book Award. Payne's work analyzing religion, politics, and popular culture has appeared in The Washington Post, NBC News, Religion News Service, and Christianity Today.