The Agony and the Ecstasy of Christian Pop

I was seven years old when my family moved back to Canada. We’d been away only for three years, my dad filling out a term with an international accounting firm. But at the time, that was half my life—most of what I’d experienced of the world had occurred an ocean away, in Bratislava, Slovakia.

I came back in a daze of mild culture shock. On a family member’s recommendation, my parents enrolled me and my brother in a Christian private school, located in a rich neighbourhood at the edge of the suburbs in Winnipeg’s south end. It was small, hadn’t been around for very long, and was recommended as being full of nice families and caring teachers. When I asked as an adult why they chose a Christian school, my parents said they wanted their kids to have “good influences.” They were worried, probably because I was a quiet, shy sort of kid, that I’d be bullied or easily peer-pressured in public school, and as religious people themselves, they thought a Christian school seemed a more trustworthy place to turn their child over to for seven hours a day.

The school was inside a Baptist church, and the building was a kind of Frankensteined half church, half school. I’d never seen a church so big or so shiny and corporate looking. The back half had a playground and a flagpole, wide doors, and an office—a stark contrast to my previous school, a blocky concrete building with bars on the windows.

The church half had a big cross and, out front, one of those signboards where you can move the letters, advertising the church’s sermon series. The floors in that front half were carpeted, and there was a big lobby and a main auditorium, lined with cushioned pews facing toward a stage. I was overwhelmed by how wide and spacious everything felt, moving from a European scale to a Canadian one. My family had always gone to church, so the markers of Christianity were familiar, but I’d never seen them appear this way: Bible verses on colourful printed posters, or Jesus fish clamped to the bumpers of the cars in the parking lot.

I hadn’t been totally cut off from pop culture while living in a different country—in fact, since one of the only English-language channels we got on our television was MTV, my family was weirdly up to date on music. But none of this was preparation enough to fit in with my new social set. There was an entirely distinct world to which I’d not been privy: evangelical pop culture. And its greatest ambassador was Christian music.

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W e attended a small neighbourhood Mennonite church where every hymn was sung in four-part harmony and every get-together was a potluck. The atmosphere was different, but it felt comfortable, homey. There was a simple, backlit wooden cross at the front and rows of mismatched pews. The building smelled like old wood and new paint. Again, I had trouble focusing on the sermons, but I understood the important rituals—like Coffee Time, when the adults stood around laughing loudly and the kids raced each other through the basement.

I was proud when it was my turn to take on a job that rotated between kids in the church: standing next to the overhead projector during Worship Time and switching out the transparencies that held the lyrics to the songs everyone was singing.

These expressions of Christianity seemed to convey the only two elements of the faith that still hold any remaining sway over me: the first, an ancient, sacred solemnity; the second, a down-to-earth sense of community. As I’ve grown, through all the shifts and transformations in my personal sense of “faith” (and what that even means to my life), I’ve never failed to see at least some sense of value in those two elements of religion. On one hand is the reminder of something larger than yourself, something that stretches thousands of years into history; on the other is the opportunity to connect tangibly in the here and now of the place and people in which you are situated. Both of those things feel spiritual to me, and Christianity, though not the only way in, was the first time I experienced either feeling.

Oddly, though, it was the trappings of evangelicalism that, despite attempts to slickly imitate secular coolness, always threw me into existential dread. Christian pop is like the uncanny valley of music—almost, but unsettlingly not quite. It’s a passable, or even quality, imitation, but its closeness to that thing actually makes it stranger. For me, the dread came into play when I began to question the larger meaning—when I thought about an omnipotent God looking down from on high and seeing Himself reflected in these small, much too human ways.

In the car on the way to school, my mom had started listening to CHVN 95.1, the local Christian radio station. Their logo had a halo hovering over the “C.” There was a strange song playing constantly that year, called “Cartoons.” In retrospect, this might have been the perfect introduction both to the world of Christian music and to the evangelical sense of humour that I would have to learn to navigate. I’m not sure how to describe this song other than to say the premise is simply three straight minutes of impressions of different cartoon characters saying the word “Hallelujah” (yabbadabba-loo-yah . . . Scooby-dooby-doo-yah . . .) kind of jammed into a melody.

“It’s kind of weird. It’s like every song is a Christian version of a normal pop song.”

In my recollection, my mom chuckled at this song the first few times she heard it, but after weeks of the onslaught, she’d groan at the opening chords and flip to another channel.

I accepted CHVN as a fact of our new life in Canada, the way you do in childhood, often accepting what happens around you to be some kind of rule of nature—in Canada, everyone listens to the Christian station. At some point in our first year back in the country, I remember overhearing my mom telling a friend that she’d been listening to Christian radio. “It’s kind of weird,” she had said. “It’s like every song is a Christian version of a normal pop song.” I was confused by her lack of allegiance to Christian radio.

I’d thought it was always on in the car because she was a fan, but it seemed she had been listening to CHVN for my benefit. She wanted to shelter her kids from secular pop, which she often complained was “all about sex.” Maybe she thought my young ears were safer sticking with yabba-dabba-loo-jah.

Her eccentric CD collection was mostly crooning women singer-songwriters: Tracy Chapman and Dolores O’Riordan of the Cranberries. She would put them on in the car or load them into the rotating six-disc slot of our home stereo system to play while she went about her day, humming quietly along. In Slovakia, my parents didn’t own Christian music, other than a compilation of Slovak Christmas carols my mom had bought at Tesco. Even though my parents read me Bible stories and took me to church every week, I hadn’t necessarily thought of faith as fundamentally intrinsic to my family’s identity but simply as one element of who we were.

Christian school disabused me of this notion. Being a Christian, I learned, was supposed to be your whole life. What’s more, there were Good Christians and Bad Christians, and you could know one or the other by how they dressed, how they spoke, if they swore, if they drank, how good they were at praying out loud—and what music they listened to.

I found myself a best friend on my first day at Christian school, and I didn’t even have to do anything. The teacher stood me and the other new kid up at the front of the class and asked for two volunteers, one for each of us, to show us around.

A little girl in a white turtleneck shot her hand up to volunteer to be my friend, and there we were. I was fascinated by her turtleneck, which had tiny pink flowers all over it, and her teal corduroy pants, which matched her little round glasses. I’ll call her Angela. Angela was my entrée into Christian Land and my first instructor in Christian Music Appreciation. Her family not only listened to CHVN but they also bought CDs of Christian music from the Christian bookstore. And she somehow knew all about the musicians themselves.

Music was one of the only things that really made me feel Christian. Not the hits on Christian radio—but church music. As a kid, I spent most of church playing tic-tac-toe on the Sunday bulletin with my brother, but I always loved the musical part of the service. Standing and unleashing your voice, part of an amateur chorus of warbling harmonies, felt good. I liked trying to sight-read along with the hymnal and choruses where the worship leader divided the church into sections and made us sing in a round.

All my fond memories of church involved music. I was always bored by the recitation of Bible passages in odd, formal language, and the drone of a sermon rarely held my attention no matter how hard I tried to listen closely. But at every church I attended, I loved the singing: sombre organ songs, old-school hymns, or cheesy choruses were all fine by me. Even as a toddler, I perched happily on various laps in my grandparents’ vaguely hippie-ish house church. My memories are a blur of shaggy beards and acoustic guitars, but the songs—the one comparing love to a magic penny, the one about being a joyful servant—remain lodged in my brain.

At school, the music wasn’t as good. At our elementary school services, which opened the school day three times a week, Worship Time consisted of a gym teacher placing a boom box on the stage in front of us and pressing “Play.” We sang along to the canned music, songs like “Our God Is an Awesome God,” and “(The Bible is the) L-I-G-H-T,” all of which had elaborate ASL-inspired actions choreographed along with them.

All my fond memories of church involved music.

Still, the kind of Christianity I was encountering at Christian school, I assumed, must be real Christianity, the kind of faith that made you a Good Christian. I worried about how little I felt, emotionally, during these assemblies—chastised myself for letting my mind wander, for being bored. When the music was good, I thought, it felt the way it seemed religion was supposed to feel: like ecstasy, like the world was cracking open to reveal some grander meaning, some outsized, omniscient truth.

I wanted to be a Good Christian, and I certainly didn’t want to go to hell. But I was confused about why holiness didn’t seem to be coming as easily to me as to others. Was I so obtuse that all sorts of mystical things were simply passing me by? To me, my obliviousness could only be construed as failure to be a Good Christian.

P erhaps that was why I fixated on understanding Christian music. Throughout elementary school, I dutifully applied myself to trying to find Christian music I liked, though I didn’t have much luck. My friends were into the Christian versions of boy bands and girl groups. There were Christian sound-alikes of Britney and Christina, and then there were those Hanson boys, who were secretly Christian but played on the normal radio. Stacie Orrico, Jaci Velasquez, Rebecca St. James—it all blended together.

Angela loved a band called Superchick. In a nostalgic mood, I recently visited songmeanings.com to remind myself of the (to me, entirely befuddling) lyrics of their song “Barlow Girls.” As a kid, I’d been confused by a line in the song that references boys finding girls attractive . . . if they resemble their mothers. Online, none of the commenters—the most recent of whom made their contribution in 2006—seem to have the same hang-ups I do about dating a boy who says you remind him of his mom. “It’s good that some artists are making songs about NOT having sex,” one commenter muses. Another wrote in 2002, “When i first hear this i phreaked out!! I was like OMiGOSH!! thats me!!!! this is an awesome song.” I was struck by a sudden memory of typing “OMiGOSH” into an MSN Messenger window, carefully making sure to emphasize that I was not taking the Lord’s name in vain through a sinful “OMG.” Feeling overwhelmed by the cringeworthy nature of this memory, I decided to leave the site.

In a video, now available on YouTube, of the 2003 Dove Awards (an annual awards program by the Gospel Music Association of America), Superchick performs this song live. The video looks like something I’d make up to explain how weird Christian music is, almost a parody of itself: squeaky-clean rockers bouncing around on stage, layering their pop-punk guitar riffs with lyrics about abstinence. The singer’s blond hair is elaborately gelled into a spiky faux-hawk, she has a thick choker necklace, and she’s wearing a skirt over (leather bellbottom) pants. She’s gorgeous, with big eyes and scarlet-red lips. But something about her looks too . . . nice. She has no piercings, and she won’t let her smiling face collapse into a snarl or a frown, even as she sings. And her studded, bedazzled tank top, where some punk message might be printed, reads only: ROCK.

A ngela also introduced me to the band Jump5, a pop group of five squeaky-voiced blond Christian kids. She particularly loved the song “Spinning Around,” which was ostensibly about God but just sounded like a love song and could therefore be easily applied to whatever blond, squeaky-voiced Christian kid in our class she had developed a crush on.

Jump5’s music videos, available heavily pixelated on YouTube, are pretty standard preteen fare. The five of them bop around in brightly coloured outfits, the camera toggling between framing elaborate choreography and individual shots of quirky, cutesy action—picking the petals off a flower, riding a carousel or bumper cars, climbing over jungle gyms. The style couldn’t be more early-2000s—tiny, round coloured glasses! Frosted tips! Skinny scarves! Skirts over jeans!—but they are also clearly putting out a more chaste version of pop stardom. Their choreography is unsexy to the point of being almost robotic, nary a body roll in sight. They give the camera big, goofy smiles instead of pouty looks, and the girls are permitted only a little bit of shoulder baring.

I asked my mom to buy me a CD entitled Wow Hits 2003 from the local Christian bookstore. Wow Hits were compilation CDs that came out annually—the Christian Contemporary Music version of Now That’s What I Call Music or Big Shiny Tunes. This edition had a Jump5 track, which I already knew I liked. I would study the rest of it, I thought—it was like a CliffsNotes guide to becoming the kind of person who was up on current Christian music.

I was determined to find something I liked on the Wow Hits compilation. It was a two-disc affair, and I deemed at least half the songs skippable. I tried to listen to the whole thing at first, but soon I had a routine. I’d slide the disc into the blue-and-silver boom box I’d received for Christmas and press the “Forward” button until I reached “All I Can Do” by Jump5. And then I’d twirl around my tiny room, slipping on the baby-blue area rug, dive-bombing my bed, imagining I could be one of those kids twirling backflips through the air, filled with the light of Jesus.

T he strange thing about Christian music as a genre is that it carries an additional purpose—it’s not simply entertainment but a conversion tool, or a teaching tool, or a message to God. There’s a clip that went viral in 2011 (according to Know Your Meme), of a boy who came to be known as Nu Thang Kid. The video, under a slick of ’90s video grain, features a ten-year-old in lilac Zubaz pants and a matching purple T-shirt that reads “Jesus is Lord.” Microphone in hand and a look of supreme concentration on his face, he earnestly performs—for two minutes and fifty seconds—the Christian pop song “Nu Thang” in a spirited arrangement that attempts, with one voice, to include the main and background vocals, rapping, and a dance breakdown.

There’s something particularly endearing to me about this clip, an earnest, full-throttle commitment I recognize from my own childhood. Kids will always throw themselves into what they’re doing, but the addition of religion creates some kind of strange alchemy. It’s the same combination that makes it so difficult to listen to Christian pop. It’s the introduction of the sacred to the commercial, with a dash of the utterly mundane. You watch a boy in his patterned pants trying to moonwalk and think, “He’s doing this for the benefit of an omniscient, all-powerful being who controls the universe?”

This inherent tension is what I found so disconcerting and hard to navigate at Christian school: everything was wrapped around these giant concepts of sin and salvation, damnation, eternity, and purpose but expressed through slogans and kitsch, “wholesome” pop bands, and “Jesus is my homeboy” T-shirts. That’s, I think, what makes it absurd. Surely, the divine is meant to bring you outside yourself, to make you understand your smallness in the universe, in a way too profound to be commercialized. It’s one thing to embody your faith in the everyday—but to sell it and sloganize it?

When we look backward, it’s hard to see clearly the things that happened to us, the things we thought and felt and believed through the distortions not only of the years but of the layers of meaning we assign to our lives, the ways we narrativize and reframe and understand ourselves. As a teen, I wanted to reinvent myself, forget who I was as a child. As a young adult, I wanted to correct all the ways my younger self had been wrong or wronged—to write myself out of the aspects of Christianity that had hurt me back then, or the ones that I was ashamed of and that I had blithely participated in. Now I search the internet for 2000s Christian pop, looking for a time-machine view, an ability to remember what I felt then.

A lot of who I was as a kid didn’t feel authentic, but it did feel good.

Perhaps the reason Jump5 resonated with me, while the other treacly hits on my Wow Hits CD did not, was that their songs contained few, if any, direct references to Christianity. They were love songs, de-sexed enough that they could be aimed at other preteens just as easily as they could be aimed at Jesus. And because they were not singing about morality, or the fate of one’s eternal soul, or a God I wasn’t entirely sure actually existed or made any sense, I could just sing and jump along. It was sugar-free candy: not bad for you, not particularly good either.

But maybe that’s the point of creating a Christian version of something, other than as a niche marketing manoeuvre. Perhaps the intent is to create enough of a positive association to an artifact that the good feelings also become linked, in one’s mind, to the religion itself. If I set certain search parameters on my memory, I can zoom through a montage of moments from my childhood and adolescence: singing along ironically to Christian pop with youth-group friends; turning up the Relient K in my friend’s car to belt out our best nasally-faux-punk harmonies; swaying, with eyes closed, to some corny Switchfoot song, delirious in the hunger pangs of a fast to raise money for charity; dancing to Jump5 on a classroom rug, falling into my friends, and collapsing in laughter.

It felt good to belong for a moment—for music to stretch the bridge between body and mind, between self and others. It felt good to be in the warm glow of a crowd moving in unison, whether raising your “praise hands” in the dim light of a church sanctuary or swivelling your little kid hips on the playground.

A lot of who I was as a kid didn’t feel authentic, but it did feel good. The music itself may not have been authentic either, may have been a mere marketing ploy for the religion I was having trouble connecting to. But it was good for me, too, at least for a while.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from Jesusland: Stories from the Upside Down World of Christian Pop Culture by Joelle Kidd, published by ECW Press, 2025. All rights reserved.