What was the first Christian album to top the Billboard chart?
In the US, Christian music is a lucrative but separate industry.
And it is massive. It’s thought that American Christian and Gospel music generates over $1.4billion annually, with an extra billion or so around the rest of the world. The big labels have been eyeing up the commercial wins to be had. Universal Music Group has its own Christian division, Capitol CMG, which, across the 2010s, gobbled up over half of the worship market before Sony Music’s Essential Music department began hoovering up some of their share into the 2020s.
Yet, the big hitters remain divorced from the mainstream. A perusal of the Billboard Top Christian Albums record breakers reveals scant mainstream artists who’ve enjoyed crossover success, if ignoring Kanye West’s gospel hip hop LPs and POD’s brief stardom during the nu-metal era.
Otherwise, Billboard’s bespoke worship charts are dominated by head scratchers like MercyMe, Casting Crowns, Newsboys, or ‘The Queen of Christian Pop’ Amy Grant, who boasts both the most number one albums as well as cumulative weeks at the top spot with 30 million record sales under her belt, despite many struggling to recognise the name.
Big rock and pop names have occasionally dipped their toe in the Christian music world, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and even two of the Misfits have cut records or forged side-projects spreading the good word, and U2 arguably exist as the world’s most successful Christian rock band, songs of faith and spirituality masked by a secular veil, but it’s a much tougher battle to stick to your worship guns and bring the mainstream in your holy direction.
Grant had to drop the religious themes for 1991’s ‘Baby Baby’ to top the Hot 100, but Christian pop rocker Michael W Smith broke ground with the previous year’s Go West Young Man, sailing to a respectable 74 on the Billboard 200. Seven years later, one key artist from the Christian world managed to top the US album charts and finally cement worship music’s viability as a soundtrack outside the church.
So, what was the first Christian album to top the charts?
He’d come from solid, God-rock stock. Fronting the Allies Christian group throughout the 1980s, Bob Carlisle would go it solo for 1993’s eponymous debut, followed by The Hope of a Man, both making little impact on the charts, Christian or otherwise.
1997 was his big year, however. Teaming up with old Allies member Randy Thomas, Carlisle penned the fatherly ‘Butterfly Kisses’, a smash single that explored the sentimental celebration over his daughter’s transition to adulthood backed by a glossy soft rock score that would make Michael Bolton proud. The Christian element is dialled right down, but the ‘Purity Ball’ associations through the roof, an uncomfortable legacy Carlisle perhaps unwittingly invited with his syrupy number.
Still, it saw Carlisle dominate the pop world, ‘Butterfly Kisses’ topping the US Adult Contemporary charts and being awarded a Grammy and the Gospel Music Association’s very own Dove gong, plus its Butterfly Kisses (Shades of Grace) album striking a number one on the Billboard 200, the very first time a legit Christian artist had sat at the premier position of America’s mainstream albums rankings.
