The Glorious Rise of Christian Pop: With big best sellers, new movies and religious rock, the $3 billion Christian entertainment industry is exploding. On tour with young believers.(Society)(Festival Con Dios, and other evangelical entrtainment)

Publication: Newsweek

Publication Date: 16-JUL-01

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Are you ready to rip the face off this place?" screams the lead singer of Pillar. A hyped-up crowd of teens--6,000 strong--goes nuts. The aggressive rap-rock band launches into a pummeling kickoff number, the surly singer pounding the stage with his steel-toed boot, sweating right through his baggy Army fatigues and black bandanna. He gestures like a member of some vicious street gang as he screams and roars into the mike, his arm swinging low as if on the way to the requisite crotch grab. This crude move is as integral to rap-rock as the blown kiss is to a lounge act, and is usually accompanied by a testosteroid explosion of expletives. The singer's hand slaps down hard on his thigh--and stays there. Gripping his pants leg with conviction, he screams, "Jesus Christ!" Pause. "Is he in your heart?"

It's time to wreak havoc and give praise at Festival Con Dios, the first Christian alternative-rock tour. This is the sanctified answer to hedonistic summer blowouts like Lollapalooza and Ozzfest, an extravaganza where amped-up rock and roll meets tamped-down self-control. On the tour, which will span more than 30 U.S. cities throughout the summer and early fall, the ska band the OC Supertones dedicates its music to God while goofing around the stage in giant Afro wigs. Thuggish rapper T-Bone busts gangsta-style rhymes about the Lord. Newsboys, the festival creators and platinum-selling Christian-rock veterans, warn of Judgment Day in an upbeat song as their drummer defies gravity on a vertical, rotating riser. And it's all in the name of Jesus.

Alternative rock is just one pillar in the gigantic cathedral of Christian entertainment. It spans from the popular "Left Behind" novels, which sold 28.8 million copies, to the Grammy-winning singer Steven Curtis Chapman, who helped pack in 50,000 at the Freedom Live festival in Tulsa, Okla., last week. Then there's the 22 million video sales of the children's cartoon "VeggieTales." This gospel-fueled fun is now a booming business and a cornerstone of American culture. So why didn't you hear the hoofbeats of its thunderous approach? Because so much of this energy fails to register on the seismographs of mainstream industry and media, the ruling parties that tend to dismiss Christian entertainment as too marginal ever to outgrow its niche position.

The largely evangelical industry has created its own parallel world anyway, a place where popular art and culture are filtered through a conservative Christian lens and infused with messages of faith. This is...

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