No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism

Stowe, David W. No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Hardback, 2011. 291 pp. $37.50 ISBN: 978-0-807-83458-9. Paperback: 2013. 304 pp. $27.95 ISBN: 978-1469606873 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 countercultural 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. …