A surreal history of Christian psychedelia
Christian rock has never had it easy. Forever consigned to popular music’s kids’ table, it’s often taken the musical believers like Creed or POD to pivot from preaching to the converted to masking their lyrical devotions to the Nazareth carpenter behind a veneer of secularism. Irish stadium fillers U2 are arguably Christian rock’s biggest name, frontman Bono candidly exploring his faith across their run of mammoth LPs, from The Joshua Tree‘s themes of spiritual redemption to the stark confessionals of tested faith on Pop‘s acerbic ‘Wake Up Dead Man’.
The fact is, the Church just isn’t sexy. Most white Christian clergy got their cassocks in a twist when rock ‘n’ roll thrust the Black man’s music onto the pop charts, terrified of the new aural subversion being pumped into innocent young minds. Nevermind that Elvis ‘The Pelvis’ Presley was a deeply committed Pentecostal good boy who would later release gospel records, Christian authorities feared that his appropriated blues and R&B would serve as a guide to promiscuous sexuality, deviation from honourable mores, or worse—pinko communism!
Rock would only continue to thumb its nose in the face of religious puritanism. John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” quip didn’t help, resulting in mass burnings of Beatles records and merchandise in the Bible Belt, but as the counterculture evolved across the 1960s, so too did a growing disdain for authority of any kind—be it the priest or ‘The Man’. The world was rapidly changing, and even the conservative end of Christianity was forced to eventually embrace elements of pop and rock as a vehicle for young Christians to spread the good word.
Why not? Underneath all the LSD, mind-expanding far-out music, and keen embrace of dropping out was simply a youth base shaking off the stuffy idyll of their 1950s upbringing and searching for a new meaning, far removed from the official narratives belched by a crooked American state. Some fried themselves too hard in liberal acid intake and were lost forever; many looked toward the East for ancient philosophical guidance, and a few directed the era’s hunger for the answer inward, discovering their relationship with Christianity free of dogma or scripture, yet deeper with renewed resolve.
While the New Testament and rock had dabbled with California’s The Crusaders garage rock band, it took Morgantown’s Mind Garage to truly touch popular credibility while praising Jesus. Formed at West Virginia University upon the encouragement of the campus priest Rev Michael Paine, Mind Garage cut two LPs of Christian progressive rock, nearly played Woodstock and performed the very first documented church rock worship service dubbed the “Electric Liturgy” by the band.
Some, like Michigan’s Dave Bixby, found the light from a place of hedonistic athleticism. Living life as a fringe hippy and indulging in daily doses of acid triggered a bout of existential turmoil followed by a fierce embrace of God. All explored on 1969’s Ode to Quetzalcoatl, Bixby would later involve himself with Christianity’s more cult fringes, become a devoted member of ‘The Group’ and lead their Second Coming album under the moniker ‘Harbinger’. The 1960s and ’70s were a golden age of New Religious Movements, Bixby among many who found solace in a community before suspicions began to take hold:
“When you’re in a cult, you don’t know it’s a cult,” he told Kaput in 2023.
Over in the social and cultural upheaval sweeping campuses to the streets during West Germany’s turbulent counterculture, Popul Vuh rode the experimental wave along with Can, Neu!, Faust, and Amon Düül II that pulled psychedelia to an infinitely more heady and somatic electronic terrain. The alias of Florian Fricke, a love of the arcane, and an eschewing of the scene’s space explorations for a musical and thematic immersion for humanity’s ‘old world’ saw him score many of filmmaker Werner Herzog‘s similarly intrepid pieces such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night.
Fricke carved his own unique communion with God as an evolution of his youthful radical Marxism. Further developing his Christian faith as a practice defined by rejecting contemporary notions of consumerism and capitalist excess, Fricke expressed a reach for a purer universalism even with his music—selling his Moog III synthesizer and focusing purely on acoustic instrumentation. “I wanted to grasp the original Christian being and feeling in order to convey the correctness of elementary truths in the Christian word,” Popul Vuh guitarist Conny Veit revealed in 1973. “Not as a preacher, but as someone for whom archaic ways of life seem more valuable and right than our own contemporary culture”.
While Christian music has found its way unexpectedly to the top of the charts, from Bob Dylan’s ‘Born Again’ era to Kanye West’s Jesus is King, rarely has anything from the world of contemporary Christian music been worth the time. Yet, for a moment, psychedelia’s barrier-breaking and countercultural innovations pulled their faith’s worship toward sincerely mystical and human places—a legacy not even the most revolutionary bohemian could have predicted.
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