Christian churches and groups within Anglo-American contexts have increasingly used popular music as a way to connect with young people. This book investigates the relationships between evangelical Christianity and popular music, focusing particularly on electronic dance music in the last twenty years. Author Stella Lau illustrates how electronic dance music is legitimized in evangelical activities by Christians’ discourses, and how the discourses challenge the divide between the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’ in the Western culture. Unlike other existing books on the relationships between music cultures and religion, which predominantly discuss the cultural implications of such phenomenon, Popular Music in Evangelical Youth Culture examines the notion of ‘spirituality’ in contemporary popular electronic dance music. Lau’s emphasis on the sonic qualities of electronic dance music opens the door for future research about the relationships between aural properties of electronic dance music and religious discourses. With three case studies conducted in the cultural hubs of electronic dance music – Bristol, Ibiza and New York – the monograph can also be used as a guidebook for ethnographic research in popular music.

This book offers a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich study of the intersections of contemporary Christianity and youth culture, focusing on evangelical engagements with punk, hip hop, surfing, and skateboarding. Ibrahim Abraham draws on interviews and fieldwork with dozens of musicians and sports enthusiasts in the USA, UK, Australia, and South Africa, and the analysis of evangelical subcultural media including music, film, and extreme sports Bibles. Evangelical Youth Culture: Alternative Music and Extreme Sports Subcultures makes innovative use of multiple theories of youth cultures and subcultures from sociology and cultural studies, and introduces the "serious leisure perspective" to the study of religion, youth, and popular culture. Engaging with the experiences of Pentecostal punks, surfing missionaries, township rappers, and skateboarding youth pastors, this book makes an original contribution to the sociology of religion, youth studies, and the study of religion and popular culture.

Christian churches and groups within Anglo-American contexts have increasingly used popular music as a way to connect with young people. This book investigates the relationships between evangelical Christianity and popular music, focusing particularly on electronic dance music in the last twenty years. Author Stella Lau illustrates how electronic dance music is legitimized in evangelical activities by Christians’ discourses, and how the discourses challenge the divide between the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’ in the Western culture. Unlike other existing books on the relationships between music cultures and religion, which predominantly discuss the cultural implications of such phenomenon, Popular Music in Evangelical Youth Culture examines the notion of ‘spirituality’ in contemporary popular electronic dance music. Lau’s emphasis on the sonic qualities of electronic dance music opens the door for future research about the relationships between aural properties of electronic dance music and religious discourses. With three case studies conducted in the cultural hubs of electronic dance music – Bristol, Ibiza and New York – the monograph can also be used as a guidebook for ethnographic research in popular music.

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The connection between American popular culture and religion is the subject of this multifaceted and innovative collection. In fourteen lively essays whose topics range from the divine feminine in The Da Vinci Code to Madonna's "Like a Prayer," and from the world of sports to the ways in which cyberculture has influenced traditional religions, this book offers fascinating insights into what popular culture reveals about the nature of American religion today. Revised throughout, this new edition features three new essays—including a fascinating look at the role of women in apocalyptic fiction such as the Left Behind series—and editor Bruce David Forbes has written a new introduction. In addition to the new textual material, each chapter concludes with a set of suggested discussion questions.

The second edition of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Popular Music provides an updated, state-of-the-art analysis of the most important themes and concepts in the field, combining research in religious studies, theology, critical musicology, cultural analysis, and sociology. It comprises 30 updated essays and six new chapters covering the following areas: · Popular Music, Religion, and Performance · Musicological Perspectives · Popular Music and Religious Syncretism · Atheism and Popular Music · Industrial Music and Noise · K-pop The Handbook continues to provide a guide to methodology, key genres and popular music subcultures, as well as an extensive updated bibliography. It remains the essential tool for anyone with an interest in popular culture generally and religion and popular music in particular.

Protest Arts, Gender, and Social Change: Fiction, Popular Songs, and the Media in Hausa Society across Borders by Ousseina Alidou examines how a new generation of novelists, popular songwriters, and musical performers in contemporary Hausa society are using their creative works to effect social change. This book empathizes with the reality of the forms of oppression, social isolation, and marginalization that vulnerable and underprivileged communities in contemporary Hausa society in Northern Nigeria and the Niger Republic have been experiencing from the mid-1980s to the present. It also highlights the ways in which song performances produce an intertextual dialogue between their lyrics and visual dramatic narratives to raise awareness against social ills, including gender-based violence and social inequalities exposed by biomedical health pandemics such as HIV and COVID-19. In these creative Hausa narratives, the oppressed and marginalized have agency in articulating their own experiences. While there is an abundance of social science studies giving voice to the dominant actors of hegemonic violence in Hausa society, there is a dearth of works that center the voices of the afflicted, unprivileged, and marginalized class, among whom are women and youth. One aim of this book is to examine the ways popular songs and fiction fill up the humanistic urgency to capture the dignity of the life of those dehumanized by local, national, and international hegemonic religious and secular forces. The book focuses on the resistance narratives of one female novelist and six song composers and performers that generate alternative counterhegemonic responses to dominant patriarchal discourses produced by cultural, religious, and political elites, thus reaching out to marginalized local and national communities and global audiences. Alidou interweaves the social, political, and biomedical epidemics with the concept of “Hausa interiority” to create a unique perspective on contemporary Hausa culture and politics through the lens of artistic productions.

Congregational Music, Conflict and Community is the first study of the music of the contemporary 'worship wars' – conflicts over church music that continue to animate and divide Protestants today – to be based on long-term in-person observation and interviews. It tells the story of the musical lives of three Canadian Mennonite congregations, who sang together despite their musical differences at the height of these debates in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Mennonites are among the most music-centered Christian groups in North America, and each congregation felt deeply about the music they chose as their own. The congregations studied span the spectrum from traditional to blended to contemporary worship styles, and from evangelical to liberal Protestant theologies. At their core, the book argues, worship wars are not fought in order to please congregants' musical tastes nor to satisfy the theological principles held by a denomination. Instead, the relationships and meanings shaped through individuals’ experiences singing in the particular ways afforded by each style of worship are most profoundly at stake in the worship wars. As such, this book will be of keen interest to scholars working across the fields of religious studies and ethnomusicology.

This authoritative volume offers the fullest account to date of Christian fundamentalism, its origins in the nineteenth century, and its development up to the present day. It looks at the movement in global terms and through a number of key subjects and debates in which it is actively engaged.

This book highlights how the diverse nature of spiritual practices are experienced and manifest through the medium of popular music. At first glance, chapters on Krishnacore, the Rave Church phenomenon and post-punk repertoire of Psychic TV may appear to have little in common; however, this book draws attention to some of the similarities of the nuances of spiritual expression that underpin the lived experience of popular music. As an interdisciplinary volume, the extensive introduction unpacks and clarifies terminology relating to the study of religion and popular music. The cross-disciplinary approach of the book makes it accessible and appealing to scholars of religious studies, cultural studies, popular music studies and theology. Unlike existing collections dealing with popular music and religion that focus on a specific genre, this innovative book offers a range of music and case studies, with chapters written by international contributors.