Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll … and Bible study? Perhaps not! This is a book about how popular music dumped sex and drugs and hooked up with Jesus, or what happens when the counterculture starts going to church. Its ambitious thesis is that the confluence of conservative Christianity and popular music during the 1970s helped to shape the contemporary social and political landscape of the United States. The music that emerged between 1967's ‘Summer of Love’ and Ronald Reagan's presidential nomination in 1980 helped, argues David Stowe, to ‘create a space at the heart of America's commercial popular culture for talk of Jesus, God, and all things spiritual’ (p. 2). The result was the growth of Christian influence through popular music and the erosion of leftist political agendas. Hence, in summary, the book is about how Christian popular music, rooted in the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, made the discourses of the Religious Right appealing to the baby boomer generation.

Through interviews with former ‘Jesus People’ and a heavy reliance on the biographies of musicians, Stowe shows that the countercultural context within which Christian popular music emerged contributed significantly to the shape of contemporary American evangelicalism: liturgically, it had a liberating effect, encouraging the development of new forms of ad hoc communal worship; missiologically, it enabled Christian discourse to extend beyond mainstream church cultures into youth culture. However, regardless of the often transgressive ideas circulating within 1960s and 1970s popular music cultures, the dominant theological ideas within these new Christian communities were, Stowe suggests, predominantly conservative evangelical. Moreover, that they were communicated through popular music enabled them to accrue subcultural capital. Jesus became cool and bands such as The Doobie Brothers and The Byrds felt no sense of cultural dissonance covering gospel songs such as Arthur Reid Reynolds' ‘Jesus is Just Alright’. Again, the point is that this embracing of Jesus is not simply a footnote in the history of popular music, but rather it is central to a cultural shift that has contributed to the growth of post-1970s evangelicalism and the subsequent rise of the Christian Right in America. Once baby boomers had been ‘turned on’ to Jesus by popular music, they became less resistant to evangelical rhetoric and social conservatism. Hence, there is a clear correlation between evangelical popular culture and the emergence of the Christian Right. However, this is a problematic thesis, which requires a more nuanced discussion than Stowe provides.

The book's strength lies in its provision of historical detail from this embryonic period of contemporary Christian music in the United States. Beginning in San Francisco in 1967, it traces Christian music from Lonnie Frisbee, Chuck Smith and the emergence of the Jesus Movement, describing how supportive communities formed alongside Christian organisations such as Calvary Chapel. Providing overviews of the careers of leading Christian artists, such as Larry Norman, Randy Matthews, Keith Green, Barry McGuire and Andraé Crouch, he shows how their work was related to other Christian-oriented musicians, such as Billy Preston, Al Green, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. This discussion of the various relationships that formed around Christian discourse is engaging and informative.

While the historical discussion of the various relationships and the emergence of the Christian music industry in the 1970s is interesting, unfortunately, the analysis of the ideas, the context, and their relationship to the music is weak. That is to say, there is too little analysis of the core theological ideas, the contested ideological spaces, and the cultural complexities that shaped religious and political thinking in the United States during the 1970s. Although Stowe briefly mentions books such as Eileen Luhr's Witnessing Suburbia (Reference Luhr2009) and Jason Bivins' Religion of Fear (Reference Bivins2008), there is little engagement with this type of sociological and historical analysis. Consequently, although it is promised in the Introduction, there is actually little theoretical discussion of the various relationships between religion, culture and society. Hence, the transition from the counterculture to the Christian Right, the principal focus of the book, is never adequately explained. It is not enough simply to state that ‘Jesus People’ played music to liberal ‘freaks’ who then got ‘turned on’ to Christianity and, as a result, adopted conservative social values, which, in turn, contributed to the rise of the Christian Right. We need more analysis of Christian popular music's relationship to its social, religious and cultural contexts, as well as some understanding of its role as a means of shaping personal and group identities, in order properly to understand this process. For example, surprisingly, there is little discussion of contested areas, such as those surrounding the politics of race and particularly sexuality. That some within the Jesus movement practiced free love, that Lonnie Frisbee was gay, and that the Children of God used music and sex, ‘flirty fishing’, to attract converts are hardly peripheral issues. Again, it's all very well to claim that the music of the 1960s and 1970s helped to ‘create a space at the heart of America's commercial popular culture for talk of Jesus, God, and all things spiritual’ (p. 2), but not to examine the impact of the turn to the self, Easternisation and the Romantic turn in late-modern societies ignores much that is important for understanding the creation of this space. Likewise, the fundamentalist vitriol levelled against popular music, including Christian music – such as the claims in popular publications by David Noebel and Bob Larson that it promoted Communism, Hinduism and Satanism – is briefly mentioned, but not analysed. Indeed, more widely, Stowe bypasses much that would problematise his rather reductive analysis of the shift towards the Right in the United States.

Having said that, this is not a book that those interested in religion and popular music can afford to ignore. While it doesn't adequately demonstrate how Christian pop music transformed American evangelicalism, as the subtitle promises, it does provide an accessible introduction to its subject, as well as indicating the significance of popular music as a conduit for religio-political discourses.