Imagine you were hungry for some pizza, so you do quick Google search for nearby pizza joints.  You discover a new one only a few blocks away from you and it’s called Pete’s Christian Pizza.  And of course the logo is a Christian fish on a pizza.

“What a strange name for a pizza place”, you say to yourself.

“How can pizza be Christian?”

I’m not sure what decision you make at that point.  Me, I probably opt to not go for it.  I figure that if they need to slap Christian lingo on there box to try to sell that pizza, there might be something wrong with that pizza…

Does anybody but me find it not only odd but actually offensive to walk into a record store and see a “Christian and Gospel” section?  Let me explain…

There is no other music that is labeled by the lifestyle choices of the artist or the philosophical or religious content of its lyrics.  There is no “atheist” music section.  There is no “hopeful agnostic” industry.  You don’t walk in looking for the newest Rufus Wainwright cd, only to be pointed to the “gay section in the back.”  That would be ridiculous and offensive.  Why categorize someone’s music by whether that person is gay or straight, republican or democrat, optimistic or pessimistic, or whether or not he or she believes in intelligent life on other planets?  Is it not just as ridiculous to categorize someone’s music by whether they believed that Jesus rose from the dead or not?

I think that having a Christian music section is as silly as having an “heliocentric dog loving Buddhist” section.  So why does it exist?  Why is there only one section of a music store that is defined not by the genre of the music (certainly, KJ-52 does not belong in the same category, musically as Sandy Patty), but by something else…

And what is that something else exactly?  Is it really the lyrical content?  Bono straight up quotes the Bible sometime in his songs.  Bob Dylan used all sorts of biblical imagery along with countless other mainstream writers and artists, and none of these albums are found in the Christian section.  Furthermore, there are albums in the “Christian” section that certainly have nothing about them that would make one think that they are Christian..

Here’s a chorus from a “Christian band” called Five Iron Frenzy:

Don’t worry what this song would say,
you’ll never hear it anyway.
They won’t play this song on the radio,
so far, so bad, that’s how it goes.
They’ll pull our records from the shelves,
so far, so bad, that’s how it goes.

The record symbolizes the upper room where the disciples started speaking in tongues.  And “the radio” is obviously an overt metaphor about the devil and all his demons…No, of course not, it’s just a song!  Just like any other song that any artist would write with angst that radio stations don’t play him as much as he’d like them to.

So certainly this category of “Christian music” can’t be solely based on lyrical content.

What else could it be based on?  Whether or not the artist is a Christian?  Certainly not, there are plenty of Christians in the other sections, and there are a number of people who are not actually Christians who are in the Christian section, so that can’t be it either.

Um… running out of ideas here…the record label? Well, I’m not even sure what a Christian record label would be defined by, but nearly every Christian record label is actually owned by a larger mainstream label, and all of these companies have people involved in the business that aren’t Christians.  Conversely, there certainly are Christians within mainstream record labels all over the place as well, so that can’t be what defines this category either.

Where this leaves us is that it makes no sense.  But it exists.  So why does it exist?  Well, I will tell you my friend.  Money.  That’s all.

There was (or perhaps used to be) a large enough market segment of the population that would gravitate towards a sign that said “Christian” on it.  I lived in Tulsa for a little while, and trust me, it would be far more likely to see something like “Pete’s Christian Pizza” there than it would be to see it in Denver.  Why?  Because there are enough of the type of Christians that would gravitate towards that fish symbol when making their pizza decisions that it makes commercial sense for Pete to put that fish on that pizza box.  While living in Tulsa, I saw all kinds of businesses with the fish logo on them.  In Denver, you would lose business by doing that, so people generally don’t do that kind of thing here.

So the question that this begs is “so what?”  Who cares if there is a section labeled Christian?  It’s not hurting anybody is it?

Well, actually… I think it does.

There are two specific evils that I’d like to talk about that I think are a direct result of this categorization.

First there is the issue of discrimination.  If a record store had a “gay music” section, people would be infuriated.  Why?  Because it’s discriminatory.  To relegate someone’s art to a small subculture of sub-art simply because that person is gay is wrong.  It hurts that artist.  It hurts all of us.  I think it’s the same with Christian music.  There are plenty of us who are Christian artists who have no desire to simply stay within some CCM ghetto around people that all think the same about everything.  There are plenty of us who are open minded to the thoughts and opinions of others who would love to enter the conversation of our culture not as a superior, bigoted judge of the rest of the world, but as a fellow human being who also has opinions and thoughts about the world that we live in that we love to express through music.

Being placed in the Christian section is the musical equivalent of a pizza company being forced by somebody to call their pizza place “Pete’s Christian Pizza” even if they’d rather not.  Can you see how forcing a business person to label their business a Christian business just because they are a Christian would be discriminatory?  It is the same thing forcing a musician who simply wants to make beautiful and honest music into the Christian category of music.  You might as well paint a scarlet letter across our chests.

Secondly, I think that this categorization hurts the art.  Because this category exists, it comes with baggage.  Imagine if you were a Republican, and you really believed Republican values, but you found out that if you wanted to make a record that it would be placed in the small Republican Music section in the back of the store.  That might effect how you make the music…  If you are going to make a “Republican record” as opposed to simply making a record as a Republican, it would probably effect the art.  In fact, it might have a tendency to overtake the art and turn it into Republican propaganda.  The music becomes secondary to the message, which means the music is probably going to suck.  You can only rhyme “Limbaugh” with so many things after all…

Well, that’s a long enough blog.  I have more to say, but I’ll shut up for now.  What do you think about all of this?