No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism by David W. Stowe (review)

Scholars of American religion have long been interested in how evangelicals have engaged in practices and strategies of cultural engagement. Frequent are their attempts to trace such cultural engagement through politics, media, and education. Far less frequent are examples of scholars considering the relationship between American evangelicals and popular culture, much less going so far as to assert that the popular music of Christianity during a given era (in this case the 1960s and 1970s) had a causal force in the transformation of the evangelical movement. This is the task that David W. Stowe sets out to accomplish in No Sympathy for the Devil.

Stowe begins his study heavily indebted to the analytical frame of “cultural front” as developed by Yale cultural historian Michael Denning. In this way, Stowe frames the convergence between the Jesus movement and its music, known as contemporary Christian music, as “a peculiar new cultural formation with unexpected consequences for the religious and political affiliations of large numbers of Americans” (5). The conceptual linchpin by which Stowe understands the causal relationship between Christian pop music and the transformation of evangelicalism can be found in his argument that music is not merely a cultural artifact but a social practice. In other words, music is not just a byproduct of culture but actually shapes culture (and subcultures) itself.

Throughout the first half of the book, Stowe explores the relationships between contemporary Christian musicians (such as Lonnie Frisbee, David Berg, and Chuck Girard), folk musicians (such as Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash), black gospel singers (such as Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gaye), and musicals ranging from Jesus Christ, Superstar to Godspell to Gospel Road. Stowe tells interesting, vivid historical accounts, drawing on interviews, newspaper articles, music liner notes, and concert programs as well as authorized biographies. These thick accounts offer the reader extraordinary insights into the cultural production of contemporary Christian music in its early, formative years.

In the second part of the book, the discussion shifts as Stowe shows how the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s grew in its influences and soon became inseparable from the social movement that mobilized a generation of evangelicals into American electoral politics beginning with Jimmy Carter and culminating with the rise of the religious right and the Reagan Revolution. Throughout this historical shift into politics, the Jesus movement and its synergistic companions are never far from the discussion. Stowe’s point is to demonstrate how Christian pop music both reflected these developments and also shaped them, giving expression to evangelical counterculture’s ambivalences toward all things mainstream.

The book is most compelling when the broad, interconnected accounts of the Jesus movement subculture are complicated by in-depth comparative accounts to show the range of ways musicians expressed their religious beliefs, thus giving the reader a window into the diversity of forms of American evangelicalism. Geography, race, class, and gender linger on the surface of Stowe’s analysis. At times, however, this reveals the shortcomings of the broad frames he chooses. For example, while in passing he mentions the presence of racial tensions in Jesus Christ, Superstar (Judas is portrayed by an African American), Stowe never explicates that tension to show the fissures and fault lines running throughout the “evangelical movement”—as if evangelicalism could ever have been described as a monolithic social force.

What makes the argument generative also limits its analytical thrust. When Stowe frames the convergence between Christian pop music, folk music, black gospel, and musicals all as a “cultural front,” this provides an interesting exercise in social network theory but offers much less by way of an understanding of what he claims to be the causal relationship between the music and American evangelicalism itself. The narrative Stowe uses to thread together these broad, diverse elements...