Body Piercing Saved My Life

Beaujon dives into this parallel universe, talking with bands that never make the Top 40 yet have hundreds of thousands of fans (the majority of Christian music is consumed in New York and L.A.). We meet a “hip and holy” mega-church pastor with sideburns, his own record label, and a penchant for singing to his miniskirted female congregants about celibacy and their subservience to men. Then there’s the reflective lead singer of, um, crossover band Pedro the Lion, whose angsty songs, filled with what Beaujon calls the “gospel of doubt,” reveal that God rock can be as full of longing, anger, and postadolescent ambivalence as its worldly twin. “Music is the public square of evangelical Christianity,” Beaujon writes, “a place where all these visions of Christ get a hearing.”