Christian rock concerts as a meeting between religion and popular culture

Authors

• Andreas Häger Åbo Akademi University

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67281

Keywords:

Popular culture, Christian rock music, Music, Popular, Contemporary Christian music, Worship, Evangelicalism, Sociology and religion, Ritual, Christianity, Symbolism, Christian, Music trade, Music concerts

Abstract

Different forms of artistic expression play a vital role in religious practices of the most diverse traditions. One very important such expression is music. This paper deals with a contemporary form of religious music, Christian rock. Rock or popular music has been used within Christianity as a means for evangelization and worship since the end of the 1960s. The genre of "contemporary Christian music", or Christian rock, stands by definition with one foot in established institutional (in practicality often evangelical) Christianity, and the other in the commercial rock musicindustry. The subject of this paper is to study how this intermediate position is manifested and negotiated in Christian rock concerts. Such a performance of Christian rock music is here assumed to be both a rock concert and a religious service. The paper will examine how this duality is expressed in practices at Christian rock concerts.