Joshua 24:15: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

At the 2018 IASPM-US conference in Nashville, I organized a roundtable of Christian music executives. Many popular music scholars know Nashville as home to country music and a hub for professional songwriters; tacitly absent from this identity is Nashville's importance to evangelical Christianity in the United States. The city and its surrounding suburbs in middle Tennessee—referred to colloquially as the “buckle of the Bible Belt” and (sometimes derisively) as the “Protestant Vatican”—hosts the executive offices of several evangelical Christian denominations. The region provides religious training at many Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries. Thomas Nelson, one of the world's largest Bible publishers, anchors Nashville's Christian print publishing industry. Many of these institutions pre-date Christian rock and what we now call contemporary Christian music (CCM), which emerged alongside the Jesus People Movement on the West Coast in the late...

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