“Christian contemporary music … is no longer a matter of quartets working their way through ‘How Great Thou Art’ while the congregation sits there and watches the bass's Adam's apple go up and down,” the Washington Post’s Henry Allen reported from Fishnet, a Christian music festival in Virginia in the summer of 1990. A group of three young men caught Allen's attention. “‘We came here to jam for the lamb,’ said Toby McKeehan, lead rapper for the Christian rap group DC Talk, all of them striding around the stage in that odd elbows-out rappers’ strut,” Allen wrote.Footnote ¹ Evangelical rap and popular music was to Allen, and perhaps to many of his readers, a new and strange phenomenon.Footnote ² But DC Talk would make rap-infused pop and rock one of the most commercially successful genres in Christian music in the 1990s. The group drew thousands of screaming kids to their concerts after their breakthrough with their third album Free at Last (1992), which topped Christian charts for sixteen months. Three years later, Jesus Freak (1995) cemented their status as one of the most influential groups in the Christian music industry. The album sold 85,000 the first week and more than half a million albums within a month. The grungy Jesus Freak would climb up to number 16 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart, while their last studio album Supernatural (1998) made its debut at number 4 on the Billboard Top 200 album chart in October 1998. Incidentally, the band was sandwiched between two of evangelical America's favorite foes at the time: Kiss and Marilyn Manson.Footnote ³

DC Talk's position between Kiss and Marilyn Manson illustrates the mainstreaming of evangelical culture in 1990s America. The group fronted a Christian music industry that had grown in prominence and power. From its start as a fringe phenomenon among southern California's Christian hippies in the 1960s, contemporary Christian music (CCM) had by the late 1980s established itself as a major force in the American music industry. Secular outlets started distributing Christian artists and secular music labels would either buy Christian labels or start their own Christian labels.Footnote ⁴ This was part of what the historian Steven Miller has labeled an “age of evangelicalism.” Starting in the early 1970s, evangelical tastes and worldview shaped public discourse and steered the national conversation on important issues.Footnote ⁵ Evangelical influence on the wider American culture shaped what came to be known as the culture wars, which pitted liberal America against white evangelical Americans in an epic battle over basic values.Footnote ⁶ DC Talk took part in this battle as they blended popular music with conservative messages. They wrote songs addressing standard evangelical causes such as abortion (“Children Can Live without It,” 1990), abstinence (“I Don't Want It,” 1992), and the war on Christmas (“Reason for the Season,” 1990).Footnote ⁷

The culture wars are often remembered as a battle over below-the-belt issues. But race and racial identities played important roles in the conflict. In areas from popular culture and education policies to welfare reform, race was on the agenda. Americans fought over what it meant to belong to a racial group, what race really was, and what policies would improve race relations. White evangelicals were eager participants in the debate over race in America. Indeed, as the sociologists Christian Smith and Michael Emerson note in their influential book Divided by Faith, race was a much more frequent topic in the white evangelical press in the 1990s than it had even been in the turbulent 1960s.Footnote ⁸ Smith and Emerson's book spurred a wave of scholarship that examines evangelicals and to race in post-civil rights USA. Historians and sociologists have explored how churches and various ministries have tried to make amends for America's original sin.Footnote ⁹ But so far little has been done regarding how race and racial issues have been discussed in evangelical popular and teen culture despite its influence on evangelical families and evangelical engagement with the wider American culture.Footnote ¹⁰

This article takes evangelical teen popular culture seriously. As Thomas E. Bergler notes, youth ministries and teen groups are “key laboratories of religious innovation” where ideas and cultural expressions are tested out under the careful watch of the religious establishment.Footnote ¹¹ The members of DC Talk were idols with the blessings of, and they worked together with, establishment evangelicalism. Indeed, the members of DC Talk were the poster boys of an evangelical America that sought to be relevant for a wider American culture also when it came to race issues. The interracial group was ideal. With two white members (Toby McKeehan and Kevin Smith) and one black member (Michael Tait), DC Talk were fairly unusual in the otherwise a largely white Christian music industry and wider evangelical culture. The three artists were eager ambassadors for a more racially diverse evangelicalism. Their songs often touched upon race and racism, with songs such as “Walls,” “Free at Last,” and “Colored People,” using imagery and narratives from the past to change the present and influence the present.

DC Talk were a product of the late 1980s. The members met as college students at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, an institution established by Moral Majority's Jerry Falwell in 1971 in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. Toby McKeehan and Michael Tait quickly became friends and later invited Kevin Smith to join their group. The three of them came from solid Baptist backgrounds. Toby McKeehan, a.k.a. TobyMac, grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. Michael Tait was raised a pastor's son in Washington, DC, just a few blocks from the Capitol. Kevin Max Smith, a.k.a. Kevin Max, grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in what sometimes is referred to as the Bible belt of the Mid-west. While in college, they played around with different bands and band names before landing on DC Talk. The name was short for Decent Christian Talk to emphasize their values and to signal the rap influence on their music. Shortly after graduating from college, they moved to Franklin, Tennessee, a suburb of Nashville and the heart of the Christian music industry. Their first album was released in 1989 with the Franklin-based evangelical ForeFront Records, who would launch a string of DC Talk albums in the years to come.

DC Talk represented and appealed to an overwhelmingly white small-town and suburban middle-class culture that saw itself as defenders of social order and respect for authority. Rap was, on the other hand, the essence of social disorder and opposition to authority. Hip-hop culture of the early 1990s may have included the silly and innocent Will Smith, who portrayed a young black kid moving from working-class Philadelphia to live with his wealthy relatives in Bel Air, California. But hip-hop of the early 1990s was sold and interpreted as the music of angry black urban youth who lived with the failed policies of 1980s Reagonomics and the War on Drugs. White, suburban Americans watched with fear the war between East Coast and West Coast rappers that fueled the imagination of angry black men going wild on the streets.Footnote ¹² Parents who turned to evangelical leaders and family experts had their worries confirmed. To them, rap was a new manifestation of criminal and sexually promiscuous black men who would defile innocent white, Christian children. In Children at Risk (1990), coauthored by Focus on the Family's James Dobson and the Family Research Council's Gary Bauer, parents could read warnings about the double threat of hard rock and rap. Rocker Axl Rose and rappers Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and Cypress Hill were only the latest on a long list of musicians on a mission to undermine American society.Footnote ¹³

But evangelical attitudes towards popular music were changing. DC Talk's alma mater Liberty University was one of many that shifted its policies on popular music. The university's extensive student honor code, The Liberty Way, regulated not only attire, telephone use, and academic conduct, but also what kind of music the students were allowed to listen to on campus. The 1989–90 edition of The Liberty Way advised, “Students are to refrain from listening to rock, Christian rock, or any music that is associated closely with this type.” But the 1991–93 handbook gave more leniency. Listening to rock music was no longer an evil per se. Resident supervisors were not to assess whether a particular type of music was appropriate for Liberty students.Footnote ¹⁴ Content was more important than genre and style. Even rap was now edible. Jerry Falwell saw in the Liberty graduates three young men who could continue his work in a new form. In a 1991 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Falwell explained his position: “I'm for it,” he said. “Young people will often attend … a concert or a rally – particularly if rap is involved – that would never attend a traditional church-type meeting.”Footnote ¹⁵ Rap, it turned out, meshed well with certain evangelical cultural traits. Rap was “a booming area in Christian music,” John Styll, editor of CCM Magazine, told the Associated Press. “It's more lyrically driven. It's the perfect setting for Christian thought.”Footnote ¹⁶ Rap's confrontational and direct style fitted well with the confrontational theology of evangelical music: you are saved or you are lost; the Bible is either truth or the Bible is a lie. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Styll described rap as “a pure form of communication, it's a natural medium for a gospel message. It's very street level, very direct.”Footnote ¹⁷

The genre became popular at a time when CCM had lost the edge it had had as it emerged out of the Christian hippie movement in southern California in the 1960s. CCM was by the late 1980s a mega-industry with stars like Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith dominating the charts. They were clean-cut, Christian versions of broad pop music and the soundtrack of white, suburban evangelical culture. Rap seemed to be the perfect genre to present evangelical Christianity as other than staid and boring. Escaping the white, suburban homogeneity of CCM was important to early Christian rappers. Artists like Stephen Wiley, P.I.D. (Preachers in Disguise), S.F.C. (Soldiers for Christ), and E.T.W. (End-Time Warriors) blended hard-hitting orthodox evangelical theology with rap music.Footnote ¹⁸ These rappers were black and wanted to show that evangelical Christianity was not just for white people. Rap “breaks the stereotype that Christians are sissies, or white, or nerds,” a member of the black group Transformation Crusade and a student at Falwell's Liberty University told the Associated Press in 1990. “We lift weights. We play basketball,” he explained.Footnote ¹⁹ DC Talk also made an effort to offer a rougher alternative to glossy Christian pop music. Their early videos “Heavenbound” (1989) and “Nu Thang” (1990) borrowed heavily from the gritty aesthetics of urban, black rappers like N.W.A. The evangelical youth magazine Campus Life liked what they saw and described the rapper Toby McKeehan as “swirling all his bland suburban whiteness with the distinct flavor of black, take-it-to-the-street rap.”Footnote ²⁰ But DC Talk did not always get the street cred they hungered for. To some, having a white rapper was the ultimate deathblow to a rap group's credibility. The Wall Street Journal described the group as having a “WASP-friendly makeup” thanks to the two white members and a white rapper. Wrote the reporter, “DC Talk may be the Christian answer to Vanilla Ice,” the white rapper who would have great commercial success, but received few kind words from critics.Footnote ²¹

The racial assumptions surrounding rap both amused and frustrated DC Talk. Singer Michael Tait expressed “some amusement over the stereotype of a black guy having to be an M.C.” in an interview with Today's Christian Music.Footnote ²² Rapper Toby McKeehan struggled with it. “I'm a white rapper and that's difficult,” he told the Inquirer in 1991. “They might think, ‘This brother can't be down, he ain't the right color’.”Footnote ²³ They further explored the topic in the video “DC Talk: Rap, Rock, and Soul” (1991). “He's vanilla, but he's definitely smooth,” Tait said about his friend McKeehan. “Well, I got the vanilla on the outside,” McKeehan replied jokingly, “but God has blessed me with chocolate down deep in my soul.” McKeehan was quick to move away from categorizing rap as a racial genre to emphasizing that skin color was irrelevant to the genre. Rap, he said, “ain't a white thing or a black thing. It's a thang. It's a [sic] urban thang.” To the suburban-raised McKeehan, however, linking rap to city culture did not solve the issue of credibility right away. “I had to go downtown, man. They did not sell rap records where I grew up,” he explained. “OK, I'm coming straight. I'm not gonna pull a Vanilla Ice on you. I grew up in the suburbs, but I had to take the metro [to] downtown DC to buy my first rap record.”Footnote ²⁴ His struggle and drive for getting enmeshed in rap culture was ultimately more important than racial and geographic markers. The members returned to the topic in an interview with Today's Christian Music. “Getting a handle … on what exactly is their ‘blackest’ musical element becomes moot,” wrote Jamie Lee Rake. Instead of engaging with race, they engaged in “a spirited debate … not over racial and ethnic quality, but musical passion.” In the end, race was something they could joke about. “The best answer [to the question of blackness] comes, perhaps,” Rake wrote, “when Michael deadpans simply, ‘Me’ – and then appends it with a jovial ‘Just kidding.’”Footnote ²⁵

DC Talk tried to move away from racial stereotypes and joked about how others tried to categorize them. This almost flippant attitude to racial categories was a long way from the historical evangelical attitude towards the issue. Both their college town Lynchburg, Virginia and their new hometown Franklin, Tennessee were in the American South, a region shaped by what the historian Paul Harvey has called a “folk theology of segregation.” God had ordered the races to live apart, they believed. Any challenge to this order could have dire consequences.Footnote ²⁶ Even DC Talk's avid supporter Jerry Falwell used his pulpit to warn against the upturn of the racial order God had intended for human beings. According to the anthropologist Susan Harding, the young preacher hailed racial segregation as biblically mandated in a 1958 sermon entitled “Segregation or Integration: Which?”. Falwell justified his views with a reference to Genesis 9:18–27, where Noah curses his son Ham to be a slave to his brothers, a Scripture which was used to support slavery.Footnote ²⁷ Falwell's public denouncements of integration were a small matter compared to the outcries from white parents in the South after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling (1954). Thousands of parents wrote letters to southern governors to share their worries about integrated schools. They peppered their letters with religious arguments for why black and white children should not sit side by side in the classroom. Ultimately, the Brown decision could lead to miscegenation, they feared, which went against the social order God had intended.Footnote ²⁸

The broader evangelical movement, however, had room for alternative thoughts. Already in the 1940s, culturally moderate fundamentalists primarily in the urban North claimed the label neo-evangelicals (later they referred to themselves as simply evangelicals) as they tried to distance themselves from fiery fundamentalists and sought new ways of engaging with the world. Inspired by new anthropological studies and theology, they argued that segregation was unbiblical.Footnote ²⁹ The most famous of them was Billy Graham, who had transferred from the fundamentalist Florida Bible Institute to the more moderate Wheaton College outside Chicago. After he had established his career as a preacher in the late 1940s, Graham challenged racial segregation in the South in the early 1950s and included black preachers such as Howard Jones on his crusades at home and abroad. Throughout, Graham preached a message of evangelical universalism. God did not care whether you are black or white, Graham insisted. At the foot of the cross, there were only sinners in need of a Savior.Footnote ³⁰

Graham's African American associate represented a black evangelicalism movement that would struggle to find its place within the wider evangelical community in the years to come. In 1963, black evangelicals established their own national organization, the National Black Evangelical Association (originally National Negro Evangelical Association) as an answer to the largely white National Association of Evangelicals. Torn between their identities as Bible-believing Christians and black Americans, black evangelicals disagreed over whether they should push for a separate black evangelical culture or work for the integration of white and black churches and institutions. Non-separatist, moderate black evangelicals tried to promote a racially inclusive evangelical movement by building on Martin Luther King's dream of the beloved community and his call for racial reconciliation.Footnote ³¹ But white conservative fundamentalists and evangelicals were less than welcoming to anything that was related to the civil rights movement.Footnote ³² The rising evangelical left was more receptive to their message. Fighting racism was on the agenda when progressive evangelicals met in Chicago over the Thanksgiving weekend in 1973 to formulate evangelical answers to pressing questions of the day. They called for systemic change and economic reform in addition to personal repentance to combat racism. The budding evangelical left, however, soon found itself deep in identity politics and differing agendas soon eroded their cooperation. Instead of forging a powerful evangelical left, the coalition splintered into several special-interest groups. Black evangelicals established a black caucus and became disillusioned about the potential of working with the evangelical left to promote racial justice.Footnote ³³

Mainstream white evangelical culture, however, thrived and moved to the right. Evangelical politics came to be defined by family values and patriotism by conservative leaders such as James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority. To them, the white, Christian family was the backbone of a strong and free America. They did not sit idly by as they saw the freedom of white, Christian families to raise their children according to their beliefs under attack. Many were aghast when the federal government threatened to withdraw the tax-exemption status from private Christian schools – often referred to as segregation academies – that sprang up in response to the Brown decision.Footnote ³⁴ As time passed, however, evangelical support of segregation became too much of a burden for a movement intent on influencing the world. The Christian right of the 1980s and 1990s tried a different approach to race. Now, racial reconciliation and cooperation across the racial divide was on the agenda. Dobson allied with black conservatives to spread the message of family values. Falwell, once an ardent supporter of racial segregation, welcomed black believers to his church and college. He touted the interracial DC Talk as excellent representatives of the faith. The movement garnered steam in the 1980s and even more so in the 1990s as black evangelicals joined forces with more conservative evangelicals to bridge the racial divide in America. This would spur a movement that shaped evangelical institutions and churches all over the country. For instance, in 1994, white Pentecostals reached out to fellow believers of another skin color in an attempt to re-create the interracial nature of early Pentecostalism. The Southern Baptist Convention – a denomination that broke with Northern Baptists over the issue of slavery in 1845 – asked for forgiveness for past sins. The Promise Keepers gathered thousands of evangelical men to promote a biblical manhood that included working for unity among Christian men across race. Billy Graham had worked diligently to promote his form of evangelical universalism nationally and internationally for decades. Now, he revived his efforts at home and held massive racial reconciliation campaigns in cities like Atlanta and St. Louis and joined forces with DC Talk to attract a young audience.Footnote ³⁵

So what message did evangelical teenagers hear when attending one of these events? DC Talk's set list during Graham's crusades included songs like “Walls” from Nu Thang (1990). The song was a rallying cry for Christians to start “tearing down the walls of segregation” and expressed a version of the evangelical universalism that drove Graham to reach out to black and white believers during the Jim Crow era. Turning age-old imagery of Jesus as the Good Shepherd watching over his flock, Toby McKeehan raps,

To DC Talk, skin color did not matter because everybody was equal in the eyes of God. This unity and equality in Christ had consequences, DC Talk insisted. Indeed, Christians had a special role in ending racism because of their faith in a God who loved everyone. To use evangelical lingo, Christians should be salt and light in the world:

The core of DC Talk's message about unity in Christ was in many ways a legacy of Graham's preaching in the 1950s and 1960s on equality in Christ. But the legacy of the period is present in “Walls” in other ways too. At the beginning of the song, we hear the voice of Martin Luther King speaking at the Great March on Detroit on 23 June 1963: “We have come to see that segregation is not only sociologically untenable, it is not only politically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.” In the video, we see close-up shots of not only King, but also South African bishop Desmond Tutu and what appears to be old footage of police brutality against civil rights activists in the 1960s. Shortly before Toby McKeehan starts rapping, we hear King's voice again. Now, we hear the famous lines from his speech on the National Mall on 28 August 1963: “I have a dream today!”Footnote ³⁷

DC Talk's sampling of Martin Luther King appeared at a particular moment in American history. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill to establish Martin Luther King Day as a federal holiday. The new holiday ushered a renewed debate over King's place in American culture. The historian Jennifer Fuller notes that popular culture was an important venue for commemorating King and the civil rights movement. Television series such as Eyes on the Prize (1987, PBS) and I'll Fly Away (1991–93, NBC), and movies such as Mississippi Burning (1988), The Long Walk Home (1990), and Malcolm X (1992), retold the story of racial strife for a 1980s and 1990s audience.Footnote ³⁸ It was a different kind of storytelling than had been possible decades earlier. Removed from the mid-century hostilities, Americans of different political convictions would embrace Martin Luther King. He gradually moved from being a deeply polarizing figure to being included in the pantheon of American political heroes.Footnote ³⁹ King became a moral center in American discourse of race and anyone seeking respectability and approval could claim him as a role model, including white evangelicals.Footnote ⁴⁰

Many wanted to claim King for themselves. So how could DC Talk find an angle to claim commonality with the civil rights leader? Two extremist movements made it easy for DC Talk to align themselves with King: the white supremacy of the Ku Klux Klan and the black nationalism of Public Enemy. In the “Walls” video, shots of King talking and civil rights activists marching in the streets while being attacked by the police are contrasted with marching Klan members and the burning of a Klan robe. The reason why shots of the Klan were included in the video was probably DC Talk's involvement in local activism to combat the white supremacist organization. The “Walls” video premiered in January 1992 in Pulaski, Tennessee, the cradle of the Klan, a small town south of DC Talk's hometown of Franklin. Pulaski had become a place of pilgrimage for Klan members who marched through the town to protest against the Martin Luther King Day. By the early 1990s, the marches drew white supremacists from not only the South, but also the upper Mid-west and the Northeast. The usually sleepy, southern small town was less than happy to be associated with the Klan. In an effort to fight back, Pulaski officials turned to DC Talk for help to represent a positive, non-racist alternative that embraced King. DC Talk accepted the invitation. The up-and-coming group drew young Tennesseans to a concert where they paid tribute to King and called for unity across the racial divide while Klan members marched the streets in protest of the federal holiday.Footnote ⁴¹

The Martin Luther King Day was also at the center of DC Talk's distancing themselves from Public Enemy. “Christian rap group DC Talk is presenting its new anti-segregationist ‘Walls’ video … as an answer to the eye-for-an-eye theatrics of Public Enemy's ‘By the Time I Get to Arizona,’” Steve Hochman of the Los Angeles Times wrote.Footnote ⁴² Public Enemy had criticized Governor Evan Mecham of Arizona for his opposition to the Martin Luther King Day.Footnote ⁴³ The group did not shy away from using graphic effects to get their message across: the video for “By the Time I Get to Arizona” (1991) included violent fantasies of murdering Mecham and his staff. In the video, we see a group of men dressed up like the Black Panthers gathering their guns and preparing for the assassination. These scenes are contrasted with a civil rights march in the King tradition throughout the video until the end, when King's assassination is reenacted parallel to a chain of assassinations of white politicians.Footnote ⁴⁴ DC Talk condemned Public Enemy's violent images. “Walls” is “in sharp contrast to the Public Enemy video,” DC Talk's spokesman told The Tennessean. “Saying it promotes Martin Luther King while it promotes violence is just not acceptable.”Footnote ⁴⁵

With the Klan and Public Enemy as counterpoints, DC Talk seemed to have very much in common with King. They were inspired by their Christian faith to work for integration and they used biblical language to argue their case. There was some historical precedent for the collaboration between white evangelicals and King. DC Talk's mentor Billy Graham had reached out to King before Graham's 1957 New York Crusade. The civil rights activist accepted the invitation to appear with Graham on the stage and later praised Graham for his work to end segregation. “[F]or you above any other preacher in America can open the eyes of many persons on this question,” King wrote in a letter to Graham after the crusade.Footnote ⁴⁶ The two leaders, however, soon went separate ways. Fundamentally different ideas of how to define and combat racism made it hard for them to cooperate. Graham, the historian Steven Miller explains, focussed on “individual decency and Christian neighborliness” over political and structural solutions, which made it hard for the two leaders to continue to work together.Footnote ⁴⁷ The two leaders also disagreed on timing. King was impatient. Graham and other evangelicals urged King to slow down. At the height of the conflict in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, Graham asked King to be patient and work for gradual change – a position that fitted all too well with the white moderates scolded in King's “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and in his speech from the March on Detroit quoted by DC Talk in “Walls.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Graham and most other evangelicals and fundamentalists at the time – both in the more moderate North and in the often outright racist South – feared that civil rights agitation would only lead to social chaos. They believed it was futile to work politically and legally to change the world. Only changed hearts could lead to social change, they argued. It was a common belief that the church's calling was not to change society, but to save souls. Jerry Falwell, for instance, voiced his criticism of King's political work in his sermon “Ministers and Marchers” in 1965. “Preachers are not called to be politicians,” the pastor urged, “but soul winners.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The individualism of white evangelicals was a stark contrast to King's blend of the communal, prophetic tradition of the black church and the liberal Protestant theology focussed on social justice. While white evangelicals spoke of lost individuals who would corrupt society, King believed society could “corrupt the soul” and highlighted the systemic nature of segregation.Footnote ⁵⁰ During the March on Detroit King described segregation as “a cancer in the body politic,” “a new form of slavery,” and “a system of adultery.”Footnote ⁵¹ To him, changed hearts were not the start, but a possible end result of meticulous and systemic change. “And so while the law may not change the hearts of men,” he argued, “it does change the habits of men if vigorously enforced, and through changes in habits, pretty soon attitudinal changes will take place and even the heart may be changed in the process.”Footnote ⁵² King's action-oriented message, then, was in direct opposition to the white evangelical approach. In the early 1990s, however, groups like DC Talk paid little to no attention to the deep ideological gap between the evangelical and social-justice traditions.

DC Talk used superficial similarities to claim a continuation between King's agenda and their own. DC Talk and their staff reduced King's message into a matter of individual sin and individual conversion. “DC Talk … believe that people should be judged by their hearts and not color of their skin,” a representative stated about the group when they returned to Pulaski for another “Love Rally” against the Klan.Footnote ⁵³ Whether or not it was a conscious act to swap the word “character” for “heart” in King's “I Have a Dream” speech, the representative's rephrasing of King revealed a key component of the evangelical view of racism. Evangelicals speak of God changing people's hearts or of people giving their hearts to Christ when they go through a born-again experience. Thus, by using the word “heart,” the representative communicated the belief that the way to change society is by conversion to Christ.Footnote ⁵⁴ DC Talk's reinvention of King's message continued in their single “Free at Last” from their 1992 album also entitled Free at Last. The song is based on the hymn “Free at Last” that King quoted at the end of his speech “I Have a Dream.” In King's rendition of the song, the last part of the line says, “thank God Almighty we're free at last.” DC Talk, by contrast, sings “thank God Almighty I'm free at last.” The different pronouns are significant. King's use of “we” reflected his communal and social vision. But DC Talk's use of “I” pointed to a standard evangelical story of individual redemption:

the chorus goes.Footnote ⁵⁵

DC Talk's use of King's legacy was also documented in Free at Last: The Movie (2002). The documentary includes footage of Toby McKeehan and Michael Tait on a visit to Birmingham, Alabama. The viewers see them walking through the halls of the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four black girls were killed in a 1963 bombing by white supremacists, learning about the struggles that the people of Birmingham went through in their fights for civil rights. After the visit to the church, the two artists sit down to discuss what they had learned. Even after learning about King and the civil rights movement's organized work to combat segregation and racism, McKeehan and Tait reduce King's message to a matter of emotion and spirituality. “Martin Luther King's only method was love,” Tait states. “That was his only firearms.” “That was his cannon,” McKeehan replies. Contemplating how to move America forward, however, McKeehan briefly steers off the evangelical conservative track when he acknowledges collective responsibility for the history of racism in America. “I bear the weight of my forefathers’ sins,” McKeehan says. The sins of his forefathers, McKeehan stresses, must be repented and white Americans have to ask their black neighbors for forgiveness. This is a solution that is spiritual and relational, not social and political. Tait's response highlights forgiveness as the key to change. “I believe as black America, and as young black people, and as young black men,” Tait says; “I have to accept Toby's apology and I have to go on with my life, because we can't sit and muddle in our oppression or our discontent or our situations.”Footnote ⁵⁶ McKeehan and Tait, then, apply the logic of evangelical confessional culture to America's political and cultural challenges. The confessional culture assumes that you can have a new start and your sins do not matter in the sight of God if you openly repent your sins and receive forgiveness for them. Your past only matters as a contrast to the person you have become and as a testament to God's generosity toward sinners. The greater the sinner, the greater the born-again hero is. People who have asked forgiveness stand out as moral examples for the rest of the world to follow. Applied to a social and political contest, the past simply functions as a contrast to what is possible in the future. The past is left behind. What matters is what lies ahead.Footnote ⁵⁷

DC Talk's and the evangelical movement's use of the past was on full display during the fortieth anniversary of the Little Rock Nine's struggles to end school segregation in Little Rock, Arkansas. DC Talk were invited by then governor Mike Huckabee to perform at a youth rally organized by local churches. The events in 1957 had been an example of how civil rights activists confronted systemic racism. But Little Rock pastors saw the anniversary as a chance to preach that racism was “a spiritual problem” with a spiritual solution.Footnote ⁵⁸ During what was described by The Economist as “a religious revival meeting only vaguely related to the subject,” teenagers from Arkansas flocked to the rally to hear a message of racial harmony in Christ.Footnote ⁵⁹ The anniversary of the Little Rock Nine's fight against structural racism became a platform upon which to preach a message that made structures irrelevant. The rally “made us realize that it doesn't matter what skin color you are,” a black teenager attending the rally with a white friend told the Baptist Press. “We're all equal. We put the division in there. There's just a little melanin (skin pigment) separating us.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Without using the words, the teen girl's downplaying of race expressed an ideology of color blindness made popular by President Ronald Reagan and other conservatives. Color blindness was a way to claim King for a conservative agenda. In a radio address on the first national Martin Luther King Day in 1986, President Reagan attacked policies such as affirmative action and antipoverty programs in the name of King. “We want a colorblind society,” Reagan explained. “A society, that in the words of Dr. King, judges people ‘not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.’”Footnote ⁶¹ Race was a group category, but what mattered to Reagan was the individual. Moving into the early 1990s, the language of color blindness became a staple in conservative circles, both at the elite level and among average Americans. Black conservative Shelby Steele's The Content of Our Character (1990) and Christian pop artist Michael W. Smith's massive hit “Color Blind” (1992) in different ways pushed an ideology where race and ethnic background are neither relevant nor interesting.

The Arkansas teen girl's statement that “just a little melanin” separated black and white Americans echoed the opening lines from DC Talk's single “Colored People” (1995): “Pardon me, your epidermis is showing, sir / I couldn't help but note your shade of melanin.” On the surface, “Colored People” is a celebration of diversity. A variety of skin colors is not a problem, but a “thing of beauty,” “passion of an artist's heart,” and part of “God's design” that put earlier generations of evangelicals concern of biblically mandated racial hierarchies on its head.Footnote ⁶² God had not intended black and white to live apart, but to coexist in Christ. Evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today captured DC Talk's enthusiasm over racial diversity. Reporting from a 1999 concert, the writer noted, “As 57,000 teenagers danced and sang along to dc Talk’s song, ‘Colored People,’ a dc Talk member shouted out, ‘Look at all of us here tonight. We're like a batch of M&Ms! Aren't we all, in fact, ‘colored people?’”Footnote ⁶³

Underneath the celebration of diversity, however, was a color-blind ideology. The majority of DC Talk's audience were white and few of them would notice that DC Talk's insistence that everybody is “colored” paid little attention to specificities and the real experiences of nonwhite Americans. Various victims of racism appear on the screen throughout the video. For instance, we see the images of an elderly, white man in a striped prisoner's suit resembling images seen from Nazi concentration camps. We see an elderly, black man holding a sign stating “I AM A MAN,” echoing the history of African American activism from the battle against slavery to the protests against segregation. Although DC Talk present different and historically specific examples of racism, the group treat them all as the same. They are all victims of “ignorance” for which “repentance is the cure.” If only each and everyone would spend “a day in the shoes of a color blind man,” McKeehan raps, racism would go away.Footnote ⁶⁴ In the guise of a celebration of diversity, “Colored People” pushes a color-blind agenda that defines racism as a matter of attitude and individual solutions.

The group would continue to overlook specificities as they moved on to write books like the 1999 Jesus Freaks: Stories of Those Who Stood for Jesus: The Ultimate Jesus Freaks. DC Talk wove together stories of martyrs throughout Christian history, from Peter the Apostle to William Tyndale to Rachel Scott, a Christian teenager who was hailed as a modern-day martyr for confirming her faith to the Columbine High mass murderer. The readers were told stories from their near history such as those of Chinese Christians opposing Communist China, a Pakistani teen killed for leaving Islam, and Russian Christians persecuted in the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁶⁵ While reading Jesus Freaks, evangelical teenagers and young adults learned that their experiences in a culture-war-ridden America was part a wider, global persecution of Christians. The culture war at home was part of a global spiritual battle for souls. The stories of persecuted Christians around the world fueled the sense of embattlement at home and rallied evangelical youth to stand defiantly against pressures to conform to secular culture. They, too, could be freaks for Jesus. To be mocked and ridiculed for their faith became a badge of honor and a sign that you were a true Christian. Indeed, the journalist Alan Noble observes, DC Talk “made martyrdom and exclusion hip.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Global persecution of Christians urged many young evangelicals to engage in international relief aid and champion a wider evangelical vision of justice.Footnote ⁶⁷ But DC Talk remained primarily focussed on the US and placed themselves solidly on the political right. In 2004, Michael Tait and Toby McKeehan published the books Under God and Living under God after meeting evangelical amateur historian David Barton.Footnote ⁶⁸ McKeehan and Tait absorbed Barton's revisionist history of the Founding Fathers as evangelical Christians who wanted to create a Christian nation. Written into what was perhaps the height of evangelical influence on American public discourse during the George W. Bush presidency, they were meant to encourage American Christians to take a stand for a Christian nation. McKeehan and Tait wrote history for the culture wars. The US, they explain, was established to be “a shining example of a nation under God.” America, however, had wandered away from its original intent and now found itself in the midst of an epic battle between “heaven and hell.” Evangelical Christians were called to turn the country back to its Christian roots.Footnote ⁶⁹

American history à la Tait and McKeehan is not afraid to tackle difficult issues. In Under God, McKeehan and Tait bring their readers into the darkest hours of American history. They tell the stories of slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Codes, and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. But America's original sin, the readers learn, was never greater than the courage and faith of heroic figures like Ida B. Wells, Sojourner Truth, and Theodore Weld, who fought to improve the lives of African Americans. Throughout the book, faith is the center of the narrative. Faith is what drove Americans to claim the freedoms and liberties promised the new nation, established to be a special nation under God. The authors also get personal. Tait shares the story of his father in an afterword. Tait Sr. grew up in the Jim Crow South in the shadow of the brutal lynching of his grandfather. A black evangelical, Tait Sr. had emphasized that racism was “not a skin problem, but a sin problem,” echoing a basic tenet of white evangelical theology. By framing racism as sin, Tait Sr. had also defined racism as an issue that should be met with forgiveness and love. This love, his son explains, is the same love that shaped African American believers from the days of slavery until the present. Even when dealing with some of the most painful parts of black history, Tait ignores specificity and context and turns the past into a universal lesson for today's Americans. Similar to what the historian Daniel Rodgers referred to as a “wrinkle in time” approach to time, where “the boundary of the past and present virtually dissolved,” Tait swiftly moves between the past and the present.Footnote ⁷⁰ He turns the history of African Americans into a single story: a story of individual conversion. The solution to all of America's troubled past and present can be summed up in one sentence: “Only love, real love in the form of Jesus Christ, will set you free.”Footnote ⁷¹

DC Talk did not bring change to evangelical America as they imagined they would. The Christian music industry is a case in point. Toby McKeehan has made a difference to black Christian artists with his label Gotee Records and the ERACE foundation, but despite his diligent work, Toby McKeehan attracted a vastly white audience.Footnote ⁷² The Christian music industry did not become a great catalyst for racial integration. The sociologist Milmon F. Harrison found that black and white Christian music existed in separate networks.Footnote ⁷³ Not only do black and white Christian artists exist in separate spheres, but they also have different messages, reflecting the different political and cultural traditions they have emerged from.Footnote ⁷⁴ Michael Tait, now a vocalist with originally Australian group Newsboys, has admitted that he is a rare exception in the world of CCM. When Urban Faith interviewed him on race in evangelical America, Tait said it would be right to describe him as “the only black guy in Christian rock.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Tait's experience was part of a wider pattern. Even after decades of working to promote racial diversity in the churches, evangelical pollster LifeWay noted in 2014, “few [pastors] have diverse flocks.”Footnote ⁷⁶ White evangelical culture has not been very hospitable to black believers. Many black evangelicals working for historically white institutions were by the mid-2000s leaving them in droves. White evangelicals, they complained, emphasized symbolism and good gestures over acts and real change. Moreover, white evangelicals were blind to their own whiteness and the cultural assumptions embedded in their supposed universal message of oneness in Christ.Footnote ⁷⁷ Despite the dream of being multiracial and inclusive, for most evangelical groups the dream remains, as the sociologist Korie L. Edwards puts it, an “elusive dream.”Footnote ⁷⁸

In 2016 DC Talk announced a cruise for their fans to be organized in 2017. DC Talk's fans were invited to sail the seas on a luxury cruise ship while attending concerts and seminars with their favorite Christian artists. If DC Talk's fans are representative of white evangelical voters, more than 80 percent of them voted for President Donald J. Trump. It would be overly simplified to put the election of Trump at the hands of three young men who rapped, sang, and danced for racial unity in Christ. But they undoubtedly took part in shaping the ways today's evangelicals address race and racism in the US. In his criticism of color blindness the historian Daniel Rodgers has noted that “it was a way of making the legacy of race disappear.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Perhaps the same could be said of DC Talk and the evangelical mainstream's dealings with race and racism. DC Talk and other evangelical pastors, leaders, and average churchgoers genuinely wanted to make a difference. They believed they did God's work as they called for an end to racism. They tried to engage with the past and to create a better future. They wanted to make evangelical Christians the new heroes of an antiracist crusade that would heal the wounds from the past. But instead, evangelicals are now the most vocal defenders of a President who lacks the basic knowledge of race in American history and the American present. White evangelicals – a group of people with a checkered past when it comes to race in America – tried to find a way to construct a new approach to deal with race only to become perhaps the most racially and theologically distinctive groups in the American political landscape.