One week in God’s Country at Creation, the biggest Christian music fest
November 4, 2016 9:20 AM   Subscribe

I was at a Sheetz eating mac 'n' cheese bites, considering my faith—or lack thereof—on my way to a Christian rock festival in rural Pennsylvania. My interests in the Creation Music Festival and reasons for being there were layered. As a music editor who'd noticed a lot of artists becoming more vocal about their beliefs (rappers like Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, and Chance the Rapper, who earlier this year released an album that was essentially a banging hip-hop gospel record), I wondered if there'd been a change in the long tradition of Christian music sucking. I also wanted to know what it's like when tens of thousands of Christians gather in the name of rock 'n' roll, a genre steeped in and born of a tradition of substance abuse, sex, and rebellion. Like, do people smoke weed? But most dauntingly, I wanted to better understand why I left this faith. But if I'm being honest with myself, all the other questions were just excuses to answer this last one.
posted by josher71 (43 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
Cool post. For those who haven't checked it, John Jeremiah Sullivan's take on Creation is enlightening as well.
posted by Bob Regular at 9:30 AM on November 4, 2016 [6 favorites]


Well, since this seems like clickbait: What's the last question?
posted by I-baLL at 9:37 AM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Ok but the question didn't get answered
posted by masquesoporfavor at 9:37 AM on November 4, 2016 [5 favorites]


Good looking out Bob Regular, I came to do the same thing.
posted by dudemanlives at 9:40 AM on November 4, 2016


Most of what I remember from my one trip to Creation is:

A) Live music is not as cool from a hundred yards away across an open field. When it was not great music to begin with, it's worse.

B) Batter-fried Oreos

C) Odd echoes of the dealer hall at GenCon, but the T-shirts were not nearly as funny and the only game for sale was an unbelievably bad Magic: The Gathering ripoff with Old Testament characters in place of Hill Giants and Grizzly Bears.
posted by Scattercat at 9:49 AM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


Well, since this seems like clickbait: What's the last question?

He means the last one he just listed: why he left the faith. It's ambiguous phrasing more than intentional clickbait.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:53 AM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


Like a gazillion other places in PA, this place seems to be smack in the middle of where I grew up and where my parents now live, and I've never heard of it. But we were more COH people.
posted by lagomorphius at 9:55 AM on November 4, 2016


"He means the last one he just listed: why he left the faith. It's ambiguous phrasing more than intentional clickbait."

Ah, awesome. Thanks!
posted by I-baLL at 9:57 AM on November 4, 2016


And it's kind of dumb, because he already knows why he left the faith: he was raised in a pretty anti-intellectual fundy sect, and when he starting thinking about even basic questions, there were no good answers available so he drifted away. That, plus some hypocrisy (ho-hum) in his Pentecostal college. It's the most boring possible version of the standard "why I left the faith" story. Or maybe I've just overdosed on the genre.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 9:57 AM on November 4, 2016 [16 favorites]


I was hoping the last question was "Do they smoke weed?"
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 10:04 AM on November 4, 2016 [16 favorites]


I want to hear more stories of "I left Christianity because I'm a Pelagian heretic."
posted by jb at 10:07 AM on November 4, 2016 [22 favorites]


is it possible that he is being intentionally obtuse - I interpreted last question to be "do people smoke weed?" since it was the last actual question asked, even though he alludes to questioning how he came to a non-religious worldview as well.
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 10:07 AM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


"[Pastor Harry Thomas] told the gathered about how the main goal of the festival is to help reach young people, to let them know that someone out there loves them regardless of who they are or what they've gone through."

Yeah, no.
posted by tippiedog at 10:08 AM on November 4, 2016 [6 favorites]


I went to the Cornerstone Festival in the late 80s, which at the time was THE CCM festival to be at. Thrown by the commune/cult/social outreach in Chicago that also produced Resurrection Band. It was an intense time in christian music (actually some great artists), and it was an intense weekend.

I have zero contact with the current CCM scene, but it seems to be alive and well and still its own alternate reality bubble.
posted by hippybear at 10:12 AM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


And it's kind of dumb, because he already knows why he left the faith: he was raised in a pretty anti-intellectual fundy sect, and when he starting thinking about even basic questions, there were no good answers available so he drifted away. That, plus some hypocrisy (ho-hum) in his Pentecostal college. It's the most boring possible version of the standard "why I left the faith" story.

Yeah, in his account the answer reads pretty straightforwardly as "genetic fallacy, plus a radical inability to walk down to my college library and pick up even one book of basic theology."

Is this what the great tradition of rational Protestant disputation (or for that matter, the great tradition of rational atheist disputation) has come to? David Hume wept.
posted by yersinia at 10:15 AM on November 4, 2016 [7 favorites]



is it possible that he is being intentionally obtuse


I don't think so.
posted by josher71 at 10:15 AM on November 4, 2016


My one takeaway from Creation 84 was a particularly nasty bout of E. Coli from the contaminated water. Oh, and when Amy Grant continued to sing a cappella even after the power went out at the entire facility, which was pretty cool.
posted by drinkcoffee at 10:17 AM on November 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


Every Christian band is basically a "Christian version" of a secular one.

There tend to be mirror versions of everything in the deeply evangalical/fundamentalist Christian world. There are Christian versions of Scouts, of Slow Food, AARP, yoga...the list goes on. Anyway, I was sort of hoping the mention of the hip-hop stars would indicate that this was a new and different kind of Christian music event, but no.

However, Creation doesn't represent every possible flavor of Christian music festival. There's one I've wanted to attend for a while, the Wild Goose Festival. It's not just music - it's activism, workshops, arts, etc. Seems very hippie-ish, but right on in terms of my personal practice.
posted by Miko at 10:25 AM on November 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


Linked from the OP: a dated, but much meatier story (once you get past the OMG RV chunk at the beginning.)

So it's possible—and indeed seems likely—that Christian rock is a musical genre, the only one I can think of, that has excellenceproofed itself.
posted by Sauce Trough at 10:34 AM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


My thoughts after reading the whole thing... is that all? I assume he didn't study creative writing or journalism at ORU.
posted by terrapin at 10:37 AM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


I went to AtlantaFest in the early 1990s, but that was the only big event I ever went to. Great bands, but it was 100+ degrees every day and the main arena felt like sitting on a BBQ grill, just metal benches on concrete. I drifted away from CCM when repetitive, self-centered praise and worship took over, and our local station started calling itself "family friendly" instead of proclaiming Christ. Typical Joel Osteen feel-good stuff over substance, which pisses me off.

That said, I went to see one of my old favorites last month, Newsboys. I was a huge fan in the 90s but had lost touch. I got to hear lots of their new music and was really getting excited until it got political & the African-American lead singer proclaimed that cops are awesome and "ALL LIVES MATTER" to great cheers from the 99% white middle-class audience. Some things never change.
posted by jhope71 at 10:40 AM on November 4, 2016 [4 favorites]


Waaaay back in '92, backpacking across Europe, we were trying to get a ride from England over to the Netherlands, and were picked up by the nicest born-again Death Metal groupie newlywed germans you'd ever want to meet on either side of the Channel.
They'd gotten married recently after seeing the error of their years of 'sex drugs and rock and roll' (they actually used this phrase) and where spending their honeymoon in an RV travelling to Christian Death Metal concerts around Europe. They played us some of the music they listened to, and they swore that the singers where praising jesus and such but it sounded just like the devil worshipping kind of death metal.
They let us hide out in the RV so we didn't have to pay to get across the Channel, and we had a long, spirited argument about the nature of faith, mainly if you could choose to have faith, then crashed in their RV. In the morning, they dropped us off in Bruges which is a whole 'nother story.
posted by signal at 10:47 AM on November 4, 2016 [22 favorites]


How It's Made: Christian Music (parody, but also not).

I can attest that CCM was something they gave the kids to listen to in payment for not listening to evil secular music. It was not a good trade. Eventually you hear some real music that grabs you and you can't go back. I would say the new stuff is worse than the stuff I listened to in the 80s, but nah. That stuff was pretty bad also.
posted by emjaybee at 11:06 AM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


The last question is "how do you reverse entropy?"
posted by Bringer Tom at 11:12 AM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


A surprisingly large number of people in the music industry, especially music journalists but also musicians, promoters, etc., are current or former Christian rock fans.
posted by Clustercuss at 11:14 AM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Spoiler alert. The answer to the last question is "42".
posted by TedW at 11:38 AM on November 4, 2016


"What is six by nine?"
posted by hippybear at 11:49 AM on November 4, 2016


I've heard some modern Christian music that was OK; dc Talk, the metal band Trouble and this guy named Bart Millard did an album of traditional hymns that I enjoyed. YMMV.
posted by jonmc at 12:31 PM on November 4, 2016


A boyish man in front of me, probably in his early 20s, called me over, holding his lit candle out. I put mine forward, and ignited the wick. I looked up at his face and we made eye contact. His eyes, twinkled, lit by candlelight.

"Jesus loves you," he said. I didn't know how to respond, so I responded the only way I could.

"Jesus loves you, too."
'Yeah, but he always loved you best', I would have been tempted to reply.

I didn't want to become an atheist, and I held on to my faith as hard as I knew how to; but it was too slippery for me and got away just before my sixth birthday and the start of first grade, in the wake of a hellish summer, and I've never been able to catch up with it since -- though I never quite lost sight of it, either.

I used to look across rooms at my parents and my older sister standing together and think 'you all believe someone is going to come along and make this ungodly mess turn out right, don't you?' and then I'd walk over and tag along as best I could. And they never rejected me, even though I was usually the one who'd made that mess.

But a couple of days ago my partner's older sister died after a 13 year ordeal of brain cancer, the last 9 years of which was confidently predicted by a veritable greek chorus of neuro-oncologists to last 6 months at most. Once, in the midst of that 9 year span, the lead neuro-oncologist was meeting with the family, going over the details of my partner's sister's case, and suddenly broke down weeping, things had reached such an awful pass.

Her husband and their extended families couldn't be deeper-dyed evangelicals if they all lived in vats instead of houses, and for 9 solid years, he displayed an unfailing combination of strength, fidelity, and loving kindness such as I would give anything I had to be able to match, if only I could.
posted by jamjam at 12:38 PM on November 4, 2016 [7 favorites]


I'm surprised we got this far without the quote from Hank Hill.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 12:41 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


I didn't care much for the Psalms when they came out, still not impressed with the genre
posted by clockzero at 1:12 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


still not impressed with the genre

The literary device of saying a thing, and then saying it again in a poetic echo of the first, seems to be particular to this genre, and while I can understand it, I've never found it particularly illuminating.
posted by hippybear at 1:26 PM on November 4, 2016


Does this mean that Stryper is popular again?
posted by hanov3r at 2:47 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


Every Christian band is basically a "Christian version" of a secular one.

When you drive through North and South Carolina going to Atlanta, the left side of the FM dial becomes all Christian radio sometime after Charlotte. This is deeply disorienting to me; I expect the stations down there to be public or college radio, having talk shows, playing indie rock or bluegrass or jazz. As you get closer to Atlanta, the stations seem to change from old school preachin' to contemporary Christian rock. And that's my exposure to it. My impression, for the hour or so I listened out of curiosity, was very much that it was very consciously cloning alternative rock songwriting and arranging and production values, but with Christian lyrics.

You know what is interesting? The modern gospel music scene, which I learned about from this article. It's like a refuge for virtuoso players, who fuse gospel, jazz, funk, and neo-soul.
posted by thelonius at 3:32 PM on November 4, 2016 [6 favorites]


Oh hi the nineties called and want their cornerstone fest back. Christian music always had good artists and shitty artists. That's like saying because poison existed all secular music sucked until lollapalooza.
posted by symbioid at 3:51 PM on November 4, 2016


Another evangelical thread on MF. I love these. I was at Cornerstone in 1990? 91? It was intense. And weird. Weird behavior can get cloaked in Christian language and suddenly it's ok.
posted by persona au gratin at 4:32 PM on November 4, 2016 [2 favorites]


The one band from then who is decent (still, to my ears) is The Choir.

In retrospect, American evangelicalism seems not to have taken in the Reformed blending of the sacred and secular. It seems to be pretty neatly juxtaposed, which allows for the creation of "Christian" (usually inferior) alternatives.

That entire subculture still gives me the willies. But I'm liking Episcopalianism.
posted by persona au gratin at 4:38 PM on November 4, 2016 [1 favorite]


You know what is interesting? The modern gospel music scene,

Check out also Robert Randolph and the Family Band, who got their start in a Newark church. I did an FPP about them and the whole Sacred Steel style a few - whoa, eight - years ago. That particular style goes back to the 30s.
posted by Miko at 5:29 PM on November 4, 2016 [3 favorites]


I remember learning of Creation from a college pal who lived nearby. There was one maybe two summers where rain caused it to be moved. But in the beginning said friend's grandfather's gas station was a stopping spot for those heading to Creation. Sadly the gas station is gone.
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 5:30 PM on November 4, 2016


There's one I've wanted to attend for a while, the Wild Goose Festival.

This is a total non-sequitur but I clicked on that link and was like, "Oh, Hot Springs. That's close enough to my hometown and I bet my Dad would love this because he's way into this flavor of new-age-y, weirdo, social justice-y "Let's Quote Irish Poets after yoga" And Did We Mention the Storytelling tent! Episocpalianism." And then I went to the staff page and found at least one of his exes.
posted by thivaia at 6:13 AM on November 5, 2016 [6 favorites]


I think Christian music is generally nonsense, but I still feel a special attachment to Newsboys, at least while Peter Furler was involved. (Related to Sia Furler, yes that Sia, they share some genes.)

I think the tendency the author is examining is... weird. The idea that Christians can't appreciate music or art or things from sources that aren't explicitly holy is bizarre and non-biblical, AFAICT. Aint it the same God that used non-Jewish prostitutes to teach the Jewish nation a lesson?
posted by iffthen at 7:32 AM on November 6, 2016


The idea that Christians can't appreciate music or art or things from sources that aren't explicitly holy is bizarre and non-biblical, AFAICT.

It's not that they can't appreciate it...it's that, for some reactionary faiths, it's seen as dangerous. Secular rock/pop music threatens to draw people away from their churches and into lifestyles fundamentalist leaders don't approve of. The problem isn't that Christians don't like non-Christian music - it's that they do - hence, the soundalike bands (and Christian versions of everything).
posted by Miko at 7:34 AM on November 6, 2016 [3 favorites]


So, can anyone tell us, *do* they smoke weed? I never wondered but now I really want to know.

I think Christian music is pretty okay. I recently drove through a swath of Nevada and listened to the Christian station because it was the only one with reception. It wasn't any worse than any of the other stations. "Chain Breaker" is still stuck in my head; so is "Say Yes". Plus, the music video is delightfully goofy and has Beyonce.

I raised an eyebrow at the description of Newsboys in this article as "the Christian U2" -- I thought U2 was the Christian U2. I guess once you get popular enough people just describe you as a band rather than as a Christian band.
posted by phoenixy at 7:26 PM on November 7, 2016 [2 favorites]


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