​Righteous Invasion of Cringe: I Survived 90s Christian Music

[June 2026]

I need to explain the particular flavor of Christian upbringing I came out of, because it wasn’t just one thing. It was two, and they didn’t always agree.

My mom, for all that she was strict in a lot of ways, also had this weird countercurrent running through her. She was a product of the hippie era, and she never fully let go of that. She took me to see Jurassic Park when I was a kid, which in some Christian households would have been considered questionable at best. She listened to the music she grew up with and didn’t apologize for it. In 1994, she took me to New York to see The Eagles on their Hell Freezes Over tour, and I got Don Henley’s autograph. That is one of the very few genuinely good memories I have of her.

And I hold onto that, because the rest is complicated. My mom was physically, verbally, and sexually abusive. She swung wildly between being overly strict and completely neglectful, sometimes in the same day. So even the freedom she gave me didn’t always feel stable. It felt arbitrary. Conditional. Like the rules could change at any moment.

At the same time, there was another influence in my life that was much more rigid and consistent. I spent a lot of my formative years in Maine with my Pentecostal grandparents and my uncle Chris (who was born late, was the same age as my brother, and became a youth pastor), and they were firmly in the “no secular anything” camp. No secular music. No secular TV outside of news programs. No going to the movies at all. Not “be careful,” not “use discernment.” Just no.

So I was growing up inside two overlapping systems. One said, “This is dangerous, but you can engage with it sometimes.” The other said, “This is dangerous, full stop, and you should not touch it at all.”

And then there was church.

My youth pastor lived somewhere in between. He listened to secular music, but he very clearly encouraged us toward Christian music. That was the safer option. The approved option. The one that wouldn’t get you side-eyed in a small group discussion. He took us to Christian concerts, to festivals like Creation, and even out of state to see DC Talk and Audio Adrenaline.

And to be fair to my mom, she didn’t really care if I listened to something like Pearl Jam. That was fine. But there were lines you did not cross. Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson were absolutely over those lines. Which of course meant I was going to listen to them anyway. At one point I snuck out to see Nine Inch Nails with Marilyn Manson opening, telling her I was going to Bible study. When I went to Woodstock ’99, I told her I was going to a Christian concert.

The end result of all of this was that I ended up in a strange middle space. I was exposed to CCM because that was what my church and youth group pushed, but I also had enough exposure to secular music to know what it actually sounded like when a genre was done well, or at least done authentically.

And that’s where something started to click for me, even if I didn’t have the language for it yet. I could hear, pretty clearly, that a lot of what I was being told was a “holy alternative” was actually just borrowing heavily from the very “worldly” music we were warned against. The same sounds, the same structures, the same trends—just repackaged, toned down, and relabeled as safe. There was this constant message that secular music was dangerous, corrupt, something to be avoided… and yet the music we were supposed to listen to kept chasing it, copying it, trailing behind it by years.

Even as a kid, that disconnect felt weird. Not just musically, but philosophically. If the outside world was so bad, why did everything inside our bubble sound like a slightly delayed echo of it?

And a really terrible one at that. Even when I was still Christian, I loathed most of the music I was "supposed" to listen to.

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4. Pretty much everything ever by Stryper

Just… Stryper. And I say this as someone who actually loves hair metal. There is a version of this genre that works. This is not that version.

Also, I cannot fuck with any band that looks like Ted Cruz was in it.

One of the things I’ve observed quietly since becoming Jewish, is that there really isn’t an equivalent to CCM in non-Orthodox Jewish culture.

That’s not to say there isn’t Jewish music. There absolutely is. There are artists who are explicitly Jewish in their themes or identity, like Matisyahu or Kosha Dillz. There are artists who draw deeply from Jewish musical traditions, like Ofra Haza z"l whose work brought Yemeni Jewish sounds to a global audience. You have groups like Yamma Ensemble performing Sephardic and Mizrahi music like “Konja mia,” preserving and reinterpreting traditions that go back centuries.

But that’s not the same thing as a parallel entertainment industry designed to replace the mainstream.

When you ask me, off the top of my head, to name “Jewish music,” my brain doesn’t go to a closed system. It goes to people like David Draiman of Disturbed, The Beastie Boys, Barbra Streisand, Lenny Kravitz, and... Michael Bolton. Artists who happen to be Jewish, whose identity may inform their work in subtle or occasional ways, but who are fully part of the broader cultural landscape. They’re not trying to be a “safe alternative” to anything. They’re just making music.

Which is perfectly fine with me.

Because what CCM represents, at its core, is not just a genre. It’s a system of control. It’s what happens when a community decides that engagement with the outside world is dangerous, and instead of teaching people how to navigate that world, it tries to replace it wholesale with something “approved.” You don’t just get different lyrics. You get an entire parallel culture that is always slightly behind, slightly off, very weird, very fake, and constantly policing itself.

Non-Orthodox Jewish culture, for all its arguments and contradictions and internal diversity, doesn’t generally do that. There’s no expectation that you wall yourself off from broader art, music, or culture and consume only the “Jewish version” of things. If anything, Jewish culture has historically thrived on interaction, adaptation, and participation. We argue with the world. We borrow from it. We contribute to it. We don’t build a sealed-off imitation of it and pretend that’s somehow more authentic.

And after growing up in a system that tried very hard to do exactly that, I can’t overstate how much of a relief that is.