“We wanna thank God for giving us the grace to give him a little glory in this building tonight,” rapper-slash-country hit-generator Jelly Roll said onstage in May at the 60th Academy of Country Music Awards. The speech came during an exultant performance of his collab with Shaboozey, “Amen,” which features the chorus, “Somebody say a prayer for me / ‘Cause the pills ran out and I still can’t sleep.” The song details a religious devotion earned through a struggle with darker forces. “Even a crooked road can still get you home,” Jelly Roll concluded.

Jelly Roll might seem like a surprising mouthpiece for this kind of preachy moment, but the song is a hit even outside the country bubble. In a recent article for Christianity Today, musicologist Kelsey McGinnis identified the work of artists like Jelly Roll, Brandon Lake, and Thomas Rhett as “barstool conversion rock,” a notably masculine form of music that sits adjacent to contemporary Christian music (CCM).

But that subgenre is far from the only religiously tinged music — created by everyone from devout evangelicals to open agnostics, from country artists to rappers — climbing the charts today; a number of pop songs are likewise courting the divine. Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things,” which arguably functions as a direct-appeal to God, was a ubiquitous bop for most of 2024. Alex Warren’s “Ordinary,” a love song that easily doubles as a Christian worship song, has slowly climbed the charts over the past few months to become one of 2025’s biggest breakout hits (it’s currently No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100).

By establishing an industry-leading sound and a distinct identity, in a time of increased polarization around religion, Christian-coded music has finally broken containment and conquered the airwaves.

Christian rock has been around for decades. What changed?

Thirty years ago, evangelical and secular culture were very much divided, says culture writer and religious historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez. “There was a much more cohesive, and even in many cases, all-encompassing Christian culture [for] kids raised in the 1990s,” she said. “It was possible to be completely insulated from secular culture. … I certainly grew up with the understanding that top 40 music was evil.” Christian radio, Christian record labels, and Christian bookstores all functioned as gatekeepers, vetting everything they passed on to consumers.

“There was a lot of money to be made in distinctively Christian merchandise,” Du Mez said. “But of course, it wasn’t presented as a business. It was presented as ministry and as evangelism.” It was also often considered hacky or trite. “The kind of joke about Christian culture is that they just copy what’s happening in secular spaces and then produce things of lower quality,” Du Mez said.

Switched on Pop’s Charlie Harding echoed this. Christian contemporary music used to sound like “whatever’s happening in pop music, five years too late,” he told me. A fan of a secular band could usually find a Christian equivalent and listen to that instead, guilt-free. Like other guilt-free treats, it might not quite hit the spot — but for decades, many Christians eschewed the pleasures of mainstream media, even as their own art trailed behind it.

Christian pop, however, was not the only form of Christian music available. There was also church worship music (also known as

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