I've had this theme on the back burner for quite a while now. It's not that I haven't wanted to post about it, but I wasn't really sure how it would be received. For good reason, there are a lot of people who are turned off by organized religion. Due to that fact, they pretty much shut out anything that has to do with religion or church.
I've already accepted the fact that I might not get as many upvotes on this post as I usually do, but I'm not ashamed of what I believe, plus, I made a promise.
Just about a week ago, 
I grew up in a pretty conservative household, but that doesn't mean we listened to church hymns all the time. In fact, the bulk of my music listening while growing up revolved around the local oldies channel playing hits from the 50's and 60's. If my dad was driving. If my mom was driving, we listened to a local AM station that had a talk show where they shared recipes.
Amazing how different life was before we had the world at our fingertips huh?
As I entered my teens, I was introduced to Contemporary Christian Music, there even used to be a magazine centered around it like Rolling Stone that I subscribed to called CCM. Remember those Columbia House and BMG CD Clubs? They had one dedicated solely to Christian music. Needless to say, besides the local top 40 radio stations, that was the bulk of my music listening.
We didn't even have cable, so MTV was this magical thing that only my rich friends got to watch.
Let's get started:
Even though I enjoyed listening to CCM music, there was always something about it that made me feel like it was "less than" the other music that was out at the time. I don't know if it was the production quality or just the fact that it was so "on the nose", but although it was good, it was just never as good as pop music.
WhiteHeart was one of the first bands to come out and kind of change that perspective for me. They had several albums out before Tales of Wonder and the song "Unchain", but this was one of the first I can remember that didn't feel so much like a CCM album. The production just seemed better and in some of the songs the veiled references to God and religion weren't as in your face. I'm not sure why that seemed better to me, but it solidified that separation between church music and regular music for me.
I just realized how hard it is going to be to pick only three songs.
Believe it or not, WhiteHeart and Whitecross were actually separate bands. Along with other bands like Petra, it appears I was a bit of a metal head before I even knew it. At least an appreciator of the hair band. It would seem there were a lot of them out there at the time. I never really got into Stryper, but Whitecross was definitely one of my favorite bands at the time. This song "My Love" is a perfect example of that 80's hair metal style and how they walked the line between it being something that could be a love song and being an outright Christian song.
I didn't find this out until much later, but apparently one of the guitar players from Whitecross was from my hometown and he lived next door to one of my best friends in high school. By then I don't even know if the band was still together and I had moved on to other music, but I still busted out my Whitecross CD's from time to time.
As the grunge and alternative music scene really started to explode in the secular world, many Christian bands popped up that were following suit. Audio Adrenaline kind of started out as a club our house style band if you listen to their early stuff, but then they gradually moved over to alternative rock.
"Never Gonna be as Big as Jesus" was probably one of my favorite songs from I think their third studio album called Bloom. They came out around the same time as Jars of Clay who actually had a bit of success on regular radio with the song "Flood". Fun fact, my brother in law went to university with the guys in Jars of Clay and was their resident admin before they even were called JoC.
Back to Audio Adrenaline... Listening to them evolve from what they were to what they became was pretty cool. If you listen to their whole catalog, you can really hear the change between Don't Censor Me and Bloom.
They even did a cover of Edgar Winters "Free Ride" on one of their albums that is pretty dang good!
Finally, I am going to leave you with a bonus track from a more obscure band called Dakoda Motor Company. "Stand Up" starts with a bass line that even 
Maybe even a little Save Ferris without as much of the Ska.
I know there are a few people out there who grew up listening to this kind of music as well. I have run across them here and there on the blockchain. 
As I said, there are a ton of other artists I could share here. The Waiting had some really good stuff that was out of the ordinary and didn't quite fit the mold of other Christian Music at the time. Pray For Rain had a Beatles vibe that was really appealing as well. Petra, Rez Band, and Barren Cross were some "heavier" bands that had a definite draw from the rock crowd. There was even Christian Rap from artists like ETW and SFC.
You might think that Christian music is all sunshine and roses, but there were other artists like Steve Taylor, and The Seventy Sevens that called out specific parts of religion or made fun of the stereotypes that many people had/have about Christians. It's some really compelling stuff if you get the chance to dig into it.
So there you go, no Hosier, no REM, and no U2, just some CCM music from my youth.
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