Music created by Christians—and other forms of art for that matter—hasn’t always been met with sighs and sneers. In the bigger scheme of history, today’s disdain is a fairly recent phenomenon—an anomaly, even. For centuries, Christians dominated the arts and shaped culture, from Michelangelo and Van Gogh to Bach and Beethoven to Tolkien and Eliot. It wasn’t until the 20th century that a shift took place, specifically in the area of music.

The concept of “Christian music” emerged in America during the mid-century. Up until then, a divide between the sacred and the secular hadn’t yet affected the musical endeavors of Christians. There was certainly liturgical music—songs and praises created by and for the church—but besides Sunday morning hymns, there was simply music: some of it created by Christians, some of it not.

That all changed in the wake of the “Jesus Movement.” In the 60s and 70s, when evangelicals set their sights on a subculture of twentysomethings, church leaders—particularly Paul Wohlegemuth, who went on to author an influential book called Rethinking Church Music—felt pressure to change in order to reach these “flower children.” Trying to stay relevant amid a movement of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll, they established an alternative to the popular music of the time, forming what came to be known as “Jesus music” and, eventually, Christian contemporary music (or CCM, for short, if you were cool and grew up in the church). Some of the earliest “Christian artists" included people such as Larry Norman and Mylon LeFevre, who sought to blend gospel music with contemporary rock.

Given these origins, it could be said that the whole movement was doomed from the onset. This new wave of Christians making music didn’t anchor itself in artistic excellence or music that spoke to popular culture; it viewed music—and art in general—as a mere tool for evangelism, or as propaganda. Christians defaulted to writing songs that simply imitated those of the mainstream, yet with less talent and lower production values, and more than a little Jesus name-dropping thrown in the mix. It’s part of the reason why Gregory Thornbury, president of the King’s College in New York City, noted that, “Christianity is the greatest of all nouns but the lamest of all adjectives.”

As a result, over the last 50 years Christians haven’t appeared to make a footprint in the realm of popular culture, specifically as it relates to explicitly “Christian music.” On the surface, they seem to have done the very opposite of what the leading New Testament scholar N.T. Wright espouses for believers: “to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology ... a worldview that will mount the historically-rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity."