Article

Culture

Music

Wildness

17 December 2024

6 min read

Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion

How popular music conjures sacred space.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Rapper Stormzy raises a hand to heaven as he sings with a gospel choir on the Glastonbury stage.

Blinded by Your Grace, Stormzy, Glastonbury 2019.

BBC.

In Faith, Hope and Carnage, his book of conversations with Seán O’Hagan, Nick Cave said: “Music plays into the yearning many of us instinctively have—you know, the God-shaped hole. It is the art form that can most effectively fill that hole, because it makes us feel less alone, existentially. It makes us feel spiritually connected. Some music can even lead us to a place where a fundamental spiritual shift of consciousness can happen. At best, it can conjure a sacred space.”

That’s because, as Elvis Presley stated during his ‘68 Comeback Special, "Rock and roll is basically just gospel music, or gospel music mixed with rhythm and blues". Following in the wake of key precursors such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Rock ‘n’ roll merged Blues (with its spiritual strand) and Country music (tapping its white gospel) while Soul music adapted much of its sound and content from Black gospel. For both, their gestures and movements, and sometimes the songs too, were adopted wholesale from Pentecostalism. Some, such as Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Cooke, felt guilt at secularising Gospel while others, like Johnny Cash, arrived at a hard-earned integration of faith and music.

All experienced opposition from a Church angry at its songs and influence being appropriated for secular ends. This opposition fed a narrative that, on both sides, equated rock and pop with hedonism and rebellion. The born-again Cliff Richard was often perceived (both positively and negatively) as the only alternative. Within this context the biblical language and imagery of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison was largely overlooked, although Dylan, in particular, spoke eloquently about the influence of scripture within the tradition of American music on which he drew.

However, this changed in two ways. First, the Church began to appropriate rock and pop to speak about Christian faith. David Wells has explained that: “The American branch of the Jesus movement effectively started in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, but there was also a parallel development in the UK that slowly evolved from beat groups performing in church coffee-bars. By 1971, leading British Christian rock band Out Of Darkness were appearing at notorious countercultural gathering Phun City, while Glastonbury introduced a “Jesus tent” that offered Christian revellers mass and holy communion twice a day.”

This development led eventually to the emergence of a new genre, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and a consequent oscillating movement between CCM and the mainstream. Mainstream artists such as Philip Bailey, David Grant, Al Green, Larry Norman and Candi Staton developed CCM careers while artists originally within CCM such as Delirious? Martyn Joseph, Julie Miller, Leslie (Sam) Phillips, Sixpence None The Richer, Switchfoot, and Steve Taylor achieved varying levels of mainstream exposure and success.

Second, the Hippie movement expanded the spirituality already inherent in rock music through the visionary aspect of drug culture and a wider engagement with religion which included significant connections with Eastern religions but also, in part through the Jesus Movement, with Christianity. This was the period of songs such as 'Presence of the Lord' by Blind Faith, 'My Sweet Lord' by George Harrison, 'Fire and Rain' by James Taylor, 'Sweet Cherry Wine' and 'Crystal Blue Persuasion' by Tommy James and the Shondells, 'Let it Be' by The Beatles, 'That's the Way God Planned It' by Billy Preston, 'Hymn' by Barclay James Harvest, 'Jesus is A Soul Man' by Laurence Reynolds, 'Are You Ready?' by Pacific Gas & Electric, 'Spirit in the Sky' by Norman Greenbaum, 'Put Your Hand in the Hand' by Ocean, 'Jesus Is Just Alright' by the Doobie Brothers, ‘God Gave Rock and Roll to You’ by Argent, and both ‘My Life Is Right’ and ‘Try Again’ by Big Star.

This was also the period of musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell and, from the Jesus Movement, Lonesome Stone and Yesterday, Today, Forever. Among the most interesting, but then relatively obscure, examples of albums connecting faith and music were Electric Prunes’ Mass in F Minor (written by David Axelrod), C.O.B.’s Moyshe McStiff and the Tartan Lancers of the Sacred Heart and Bill Fay’s Time of the Last Persecution. Gram Parsons drew heavily on the Gospel music tradition in Country Music, also taking The Byrds in the same direction, while many of the songs of Judee Sill dealt specifically with Christian spirituality.

It was that spirit that was transposed into the feel and flow of rock and soul and it is this that gives rock and soul its affective nature.

With the majority of Soul stars having begun singing in church, many of the most effective integrations of faith and music were also found there, with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On and the Gospel-folk of the Staple Singers, such as Be What You Are, being among the best and most socially committed examples. Gospel featured directly with Preston, Edwin Hawkins Singers, Aretha Franklin’s gospel albums, and Green's albums from the Belle Album onwards.

The biblical language and imagery of stars like Cave, Leonard Cohen, Dylan, Morrison and Bruce Springsteen began to be understood and appreciated. This was helped to varying degrees by explicitly ‘Christian’ periods in the work of Dylan, Van the Man and, more latterly, Cave. Dylan’s conversion came about through the Vineyard Church movement which also impacted musicians such as T Bone Burnett, Bryan MacLean, David Mansfield, Maria McKee, and Stephen Soles.

Musicians such as After The Fire, The Alarm, The Alpha Band, Burnett, The Call, Peter Case, Bruce Cockburn, Deacon Blue, Extreme, Galactic Cowboys, Inner City, Innocence Mission, Kings X, Lone Justice, McKee, Buddy & Julie Miller, Moby, Over The Rhine, Phillips, Ricky Ross, 16 Horsepower, Mavis Staples, U2, Violent Femmes, Gillian Welch, Jim White, and Victoria Williams rather than singing about the light (of Christ) as CCM artists tended to do, instead sang about the world which they saw through the light (of Christ).

As rock and pop fragmented into a myriad of genres, this latter approach to the expression of faith (which was first articulated by Burnett) continues in the music of Belle and Sebastian, Eric Bibb, Blessid Union of Souls, Creed, Fay, Brandon Flowers, Good Charlotte, Ben Harper, Held By Trees, The Killers, Michael Kiwanuka, Ed Kowalczyk, Lifehouse, Live, Low, Neal Morse, Mumford and Sons, Joy Oladokun, Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, SAULT, Scott Stapp, Sufjan Stevens, Stormzy, The Welcome Wagon, and Woven Hand.

With his latest album Wild God, Cave is using rock music to conjure sacred space. ‘Joy’ begins, “I woke up this morning with the blues all around my head” but its key moment of transition comes when he falls to his knees calling out “have mercy on me please” and “a voice came low and hollow” saying “we’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy”. In ‘Wild God’, the antidote to “feeling lonely” and “feeling blue” is to “Bring your spirit down” so that He moves “through your body like a prehistoric bird”.

In his examination of the roots of rock and roll, James Cosby notes that the entire purpose of Pentecostalism was to play music that most let its adherents feel the Holy Spirit in their bodies. It was that spirit that was transposed into the feel and flow of rock and soul and it is this that gives rock and soul its affective nature. This is where “the heart, joy and sheer exhilaration of rock 'n' roll comes from” and it may also be “one of the best examples of America’s ability to draw from both the sacred and the secular”.

Many of the artists mentioned above feature on the author's Closer to the Light playlist on Spotify.

Listen now

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Give now

Review

Books

Culture

War & peace

6 August 2025

5 min read

Nuclear War A Scenario: the book that imagines the inconceivable

It's the most depressing book that you really need to read

Simon Burton-Jones

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A nuclear explosion glows red and orange against the night sky.

A test explosion, 1956.

Nuclear War A Scenario (Torva, 2024) by Annie Jacobsen is about the most depressing book you could ever read and, perversely, all the more reason to read it. Collectively, the human race has buried its head in the sand over the existence, power and proliferation of nuclear weapons. We are understandably focussed on the lasting impacts of climate change; however, nuclear war promises planetary destruction and the risks surrounding it have grown, rather than lessened, since the end of the Cold War.

To help us focus on what we would rather not, Annie Jacobsen gives her book a plausible but hypothetical scenario. It starts with North Korea, for there we have an unbalanced, remote individual; an empathy free despot with unfettered power and unimaginable weapons at his disposal that now have the capacity to reach the east coast of the United States.

We do not learn his reasons for launching missiles against the US in the scenario and never would, were it to happen, because Armageddon takes only minutes to unfold. Jacobsen is deeply informed round nuclear war, having talked to many highly placed American officials. One recurring anxiety she meets is that the decision to launch nuclear missiles is in the hands of the President alone and the US still operates on the so-called Launch on Warning doctrine.

Launch on Warning means America will fire its nuclear weapons once its early warning sensor systems merely warn of an impending nuclear attack. These systems are sophisticated, but they can also be wrong, as the US discovered in 1979 when it briefly believed it was under attack from the Soviet Union. In Jacobsen’s scenario, the President has six minutes to decide what measures to take and has something approximating a menu to assist with this. Ronald Reagan observed:

Six minutes to decide how to respond to a blip on a radar scope and decide whether to release Armageddon! How could anyone apply reason at a time like that?

The menu, a little like ordering pizza with preferred toppings, is supposed to help with that moment.

In Jacobsen’s scenario, US nuclear weapons are unleashed against North Korea but have to travel over Russia to get there. Russia’s early warning systems are less sophisticated and in the scenario these US missiles are believed to be an attack on Russia, not North Korea. This leads to Russia’s own uncompromising, near instantaneous response which leads to … well, you get the picture.

A one megaton thermonuclear weapon detonates at one hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit, which is four or five times hotter than the temperature at the centre of the sun and creates a fireball that expands at millions of miles an hour. This alone is unimaginable; replicating it hundreds of times over is impossible. The injuries sustained among those left; the loss of food, water, sanitation; the breakdown of law and order; the arrival of nuclear winter where temperatures plummet for decades without any infrastructure led Nikita Khrushchev to say: ‘the survivors will envy the dead’.

Mark Lynas, a writer who for years has been helping the world to understand the science of climate change has recently turned his focus on the nuclear threat in his book ‘Six Minutes to Winter’. He observes:

‘There’s no adaptation options for nuclear war. Nuclear winter will kill virtually the entire human population. And there’s nothing you can do to prepare, and there’s nothing you can do to adapt when it happens, because it happens over the space of hours. It is a vastly more catastrophic, existential risk than climate change.’

Reaching the end of human capacity is an unsettling experience. Solutionism is the Valley’s mantra: technology can solve every human problem, but binary thinking neglects the social, political and moral complexity of many issues and, in any case, catastrophic nuclear explosions are as likely to happen by accident as design - and could do at any time. It’s not that we need more time for AI to resolve this existential threat; it’s that it never will.

This is where the moral strength of faith traditions come into play as people embrace the strange hope of the powerless. Christian faith in particular cannot succumb to fatalism or the hacking of the book of Revelation to interpret the end of all things as code for nuclear war. God is creator and we are co-creators with him; we are not called to destruction when he has promised to renew the face of the earth through the resurrection of Christ.

There is something specific about our generation. For eighty years, since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have been the first generation with the capacity to destroy the whole world. Understandably, we do not want to think about this, but the fallout from this nuclear denial is that risks continue to multiply. More nations are thinking about developing nuclear weapons in an unstable world. In June 2025, the global nuclear watchdog, the IAEA said Iran was failing to meet its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in two decades and within days, Israel had launched missile strikes on Iranian nuclear sites – and many other targets – to set its nuclear programme back, followed in a significant escalation by US strikes. Nuclear weapons are a very present cause of insecurity, as the recent missile exchanges between India and Pakistan show so gravely.

Despots watched what happened to Muammar Gaddafi after he relinquished his designs on weapons of mass destruction following pressure from western powers and are unlikely to make the same mistake. No-one can be sure the current US administration will offer a nuclear umbrella to Europe, especially when the President’s instincts are not internationalist and his preoccupation is with a golden dome shielding continental America instead.

Almost no-one has agency in this, except for one vital piece of the puzzle: intercessory prayer, rooted in the promises of God. The ancient psalm writer prophesies:

He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;

He breaks the bow and shatters the spear;

He burns the shields with fire.

Be still, and know that I am God!

I am exalted among the nations,

I am exalted in the earth.

And something greater than the spear is among us today.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief