(RNS) — On Sunday (Sept. 21), as conservative activist Charlie Kirk was eulogized in Glendale, Arizona, by luminaries of the American right, Christian music superstars Chris Tomlin, Brandon Lake, Phil Wickham, Kari Jobe Carnes and Cody Carnes led the mourners in singing contemporary worship songs as well as old standbys. In the days since his Sept. 10 assassination, other prominent Christian musicians such as Michael W. Smith and Matthew West have memorialized Kirk as a “true patriot” doing “the work of the Lord,” a martyr inspiring future generations of Christians to “carry the banner of Christ.”
This outpouring will not surprise anyone familiar with the business of contemporary Christian music — known familiarly as CCM — the predominantly white evangelical Christian devotional pop music that has often gone hand in hand with conservative activism.
Since its birth in the late 1970s, CCM has encouraged conservative political activism, and it has thrived on marketing a religiously inspired American patriotism. (Black gospel music, on the other hand, has not followed these patterns.) It took a while for CCM to find its political niche: In the early days of the industry, CCM artists participated in a broad array of political and social activism, from ending nuclear armament to Farm Aid, and raised money for AIDS patients.
As CCM grew as a business, however, the most successful political and social efforts were those aligned with the GOP platform.
Through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, top-selling Christian music reliably repeated top priorities of the Republican National Committee. Christian music promoted the pro-life movement, abstinence-only education in public schools and — especially after 9/11 — enthusiastically articulated American exceptionalism. Christian artists often framed their support for these causes apocalyptically; Jesus was coming soon, the logic went, and therefore, the time for mincing words about abortion or sex ed was over. Direct pleas for Christian causes were what was needed at the end of time.
Savvy evangelical political activists came to see in CCM a critical “soft power” that could be used to shape American foreign and domestic policy, and Christian musicians were recruited to use their concerts to collect purity pledges in support of True Love Waits’ abstinence-only sex education, as well as donations to support charities like World Vision and Compassion International.
In the early aughts, Mark D. Rodgers, staff director for the Senate Republican Conference and former chief of staff to then-Sen. Rick Santorum, recognized that CCM stars offered a powerful gateway into a vast network of evangelical activists and media producers. A longtime Capitol Hill insider, Rodgers drew upon the evangelical strategist James Davison Hunter’s argument that Christians should be a “faithful presence” in “elite levels of sectors that shape worldview.”
In an interview for “God Gave Rock & Roll to You: A History of Contemporary Christian Music,” Rodgers explained how CCM artists fit into activist efforts. “Who are the elites of our day?” he reasoned. “If we are talking about strategically engaging sectors that shape worldview, it felt to me like art and entertainment was a sector that should be a priority.”
Beginning in 2001, Rodgers pursued connections with both mainstream entertainers and CCM artists, attending the GMA Dove Awards (the Christian music scene’s Grammys), conversing with leading figures and hosting political briefings. For Rodgers, this strategy was grounded in a conviction: “Politics is downstream of culture,” he said. “Christian artists play a role with their craft in shaping world view, moral imagination, what we love, and what we hate.”
When U2’s Bono began lobbying American politicians for African debt relief, Rodgers instead mobilized evangelicals through their own cultural icons, arguing that “the strategic way to reach evangelicals is to recruit evangelicals,” specifically by mobilizing Christian music artists. Rodgers was among those who encouraged Bono to promote his nonprofit DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) by meeting with a cross-section of CCM stars in December 2002.
When CCM stars spoke about DATA at their concerts and lobbied Congress to forgive African debt, officials assumed they spoke for their festival audiences. Their advocacy helped generate bipartisan support for President George W. Bush’s PEPFAR initiative in 2003, which launched billions of dollars in U.S. aid to Africa.
Republican partnerships with Christian artists have continued in the intervening years, and the Trump administration has actively courted well-known CCM artists along with Christian artists who write and perform music used in evangelical liturgy, known as “worship music,” such as Tomlin and the Carneses. By inviting them to the White House, and now including them at Kirk’s memorial service, conservative activists are capitalizing on the very effective power of Christian music to be the soundtrack of the religious right.
The soft power of Christian musicians like the Carneses has arguably grown over the years because, in many ways, Christian musicians in the 2020s have an even more direct access to their fans than they did in the aughts. They no longer need fans to come to concerts: Through social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, their access to the faithful has grown exponentially, increasing their value to conservative political organizations.
For their part, Christian musicians like megastar Forrest Frank seem determined not to view their support for Kirk or their place in the conservative media-verse as “political.” Instead, Frank frames Kirk’s death through the lens of the end times. The day after the assassination, Frank shared a video of himself weeping as he watched Kirk praise his music and declared “Jesus is Lord.”
The following day, Frank reported a loss of 30,000 Instagram followers. Unfazed by the exodus, he reflected on Kirk’s death through his own anticipation of the Second Coming. The loss of followers, Frank reckoned, was nothing compared with saving souls at the end of time, and Frank, along with many other Christian artists, recognized Kirk as a fellow witness. “Today is the day,” the singer told his remaining 6 million followers. “The hour is at hand.” On Wednesday, Frank debuted a new song about the ordeal: “JESUS IS COMING BACK SOON.”
(Leah Payne is author of “God Gave Rock and Roll to You: a History of Contemporary Christian Music” and director of Candler School of Theology’s Summer Institute for Global Charismatic-Pentecostal Studies. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)